Our Price follow Tower?

Posted by: Not For Me on 16 February 2004

Have they ceased trading?

The one in Boscombe was closing down today, and others I know have become Sanity, and then closed?

I know some were converted into Virgin Megastores Express, but are the rest in the bin?

What has happened to your local one?

DS

ITC - CJ Bolland - The 4th Sign
Posted on: 16 February 2004 by Rasher
Virgin won't be far behind. Seems they sell everything but CD's. Nice range of T-shirts and magazines though, books and DVD's too.
They had Mogwai under Dance!!! (well, they didn't because the slot was empty).
Posted on: 16 February 2004 by Bosh
At least HMV are safe judging by how busy their stores seem to be and their markup on CDs Eek
Posted on: 17 February 2004 by Tim Jones
IIRC Virgin took Our Price over a few years ago. They seemed to have tried a multi-format, er, format which hasn't worked.

HMV (who owns them incidentally?) have stuck with the "just stock lots of CDs" and round my way seem to be cleaning up as a result.
Posted on: 17 February 2004 by Simon Perry
I know someone who is a manager at HMV. They differ from some of the other chains in that they give lots of freedom to the store managers to make stocking decisions. They have definitely gone down the big store, lots of stock, plenty of mark-up model and it seems to be working. Still, less choice on the high street has got to be a bad thing.
Posted on: 18 February 2004 by greeny
quote:
HMV (who owns them incidentally?)


EMI I believe.

I find HMV generally quite good, the large stores have good stock, and there's always some reasonable offer on.
Posted on: 20 February 2004 by Kevin-W
Chaps

HMV is owned by HMV Media (which also owns Waterstones).

Our Price were always an incredibly crap chain - pretty hopeless at anything apart from mainstream chart stuff; they had very low levels of customer service too (not surprising, given the wages they used to pay: I know, I worked there!!!)

I used to work for Tower as a callow youth; their big strength was always their depth of range - particularly in the fields of jazz, classical and soundtracks/shows; specialist staff were very knowledgeable. However, I think they suffered by taking their eye off the ball and moving too far into the mainstream and letting specialist stuff lapse. Also, they never made enough of the fact that given they were huge in the USA and Japan, they could source imports from those territories quicker and more cheaply than anyone. THey also abandoned vinyl too quickly. A big strength of HMV's megastores is that they have reasonable vinyl sections.

Kevin