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HMV's long goodbye?


chrisp65

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Agree Bicks.

Although it is a store I would miss for DVDs - I stopped shopping there when they stopped selling Vinyl :(

Still think they should offer an in-store download service, plug in your MP3 player and download tracks etc

Thats actually a great idea and would do a lot to revamping their model.

Stick £1 and download a track of your choice there and now.

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They are still advertising on national TV I see. (I'm watching Step Brothers on Channel 5 and in the ad break they were advertising The Inbetweeners box set (series 1,2 and 3) for £18 .

I saw it in Asda today for £10 . HMV have always been a rip off.

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HMV are f*cked because of incompetence at the top.

Simon Fox gave himself a 50% pay rise last December - the prick.

The head office seems to have shed any staff with any clue whatsoever about product. They don't notice when important artists disappear from the catalogue, and certainly can't be bothered to try to find alternatives.

It's left to a handful staff at the larger stores that speak to importers direct. They don't get paid for the extra hours they put in.

Big mistakes with clothing lines (how **** stupid was that?), a piss poor points card, not taking advantage of the live music situation, not opening up the website to private sellers and an utterly disastrous attempt at letting 'an algorithm' order stock for the company.

....the bigger names on the high street, well known chains will lose out because increasingly they're not terribly nice places to shop in. The focus on add on sales, 'linking' to a purchase increasingly puts off people and alienates them, making them painfully aware that when they walked in the store and considered making a purchase the company desperately wants them to buy high mark up add ons, rather than being a genuinely valued customer they feel they are walking wallet.

All this too.

The words removed on fat money have f*cked it up.

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I do like HMV as a great place to walk around if your wasting time in city centre ;). Though a closing down sale might tempt me.

Feel it isnt so expensive over here compared to UK though when i went to store in London a few months ago i felt it was even cheaper there

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I did write that with HMV (amongst others...) in mind to be honest.

I can only comment from outside the business, obviously, but I'm not sure that without a considerable change in the way the business worked, HMV would do markedly better - they're just not competitive. They're too expensive, asides from sales, and even then their sales prices regularly just brought things in line with competitors.

Moving into preowned always struck me as a slightly desperate move to me, from a position of strength it'd seem aggressive and positive, from the weak position they were in it just seemed like an attempt to grab at easy money, especially when I've heard the whole thing is a bit unthought out from HMV's perspective - offering silly prices and the like.

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Missus worked for Zavvi when they got told on Christmas Eve it was toast. HMV very, very much going down the same route, although for different reasons entirely. (the genius that negotiated a MASSIVE credit on stock from Entertainment UK then went on to rue his own liquidity crisis and took the place down. Then managed to pop up in the news years later by taking that nightclub chain Oceana or whatever it's call down. Simon Douglas, give up CEO roles mate, you're clearly no good at it)

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My dad is a massive lover of HMV as he has CD's everywhere, even he now has taken to getting them offline which is much cheaper than HMV. He is a music boffin and has commented recently on how much HMV have gone down the pan, hardly any specialist CD's he wanted and a lot more dvd sections. Personally haven't brought anything from there in ages.

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While I feel sorry for staff who will lose their jobs, I wont miss HMV one bit. They put lots of bloody good indie shops out of business ten years ago, now they are getting a taste of their own medicine. What goes around comes around.

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I will always have a special place in my heart for HMV, if only for that time I was idly browsing their "Xmas films for the whole family" display a few years back and found copies of 'Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence' proudly displayed twixt 'Miracle on 34th Street' and 'Jingle All The Way'.

Because nothing spells "yuletide cheer" more than van der Post's harrowing tale of brutalism, repressed sexuality and seppuku in the heart-warming setting of a Japanese POW camp.

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^ when that happens it's usually an offer price intended to get rid of stock - they want shot of stock lying around that is costing them money. whereas the preowned stock they're happier to hold on to for a while because theres a far far far greater profit margin.

It's not an indication of a company being ****, as silly as it seems to the customer.

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If its silly to the customer then as small a part of a reason they are **** it may be, its still a symptom. As it puts people off from shopping there as it makes it appear the store has no clue what they are doing. Its not even as if its limited to one game, I see it all the time and its a major reason why I never step foot in GAME anymore.

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If its silly to the customer then as small a part of a reason they are **** it may be, its still a symptom. As it puts people off from shopping there as it makes it appear the store has no clue what they are doing. Its not even as if its limited to one game, I see it all the time and its a major reason why I never step foot in GAME anymore.

Game and the like have done it for years, it's not example of the company being ****, as I said. When Game Group was turning enormous profits earlier in this console generation, you could spot offers where a new game was cheaper than preowned - I can tell you now that you could walk into store and find it this very second, as offers are currently on.

It's simply a way of moving on stock. And far from making the customer feel like the company hasn't got a clue what it's doing, they often feel like they've got a bit of a deal, which they often have - it's just not one where they should feel they've won a little victory over the company like deals often can make people think, they've actually done exactly what the company wanted.

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