HMV are deaded too.

Cheers! I don't hold out too much hope though. Still, you never know...

Good result for your boys last night. I guess you'd rather face us in the next round than the Mancs, right?

Correct and its saves a 500 mile round trip. When 75,000 all want to leave at the same time getting away from old tatford is a joke.

Mista h

I'm probably like many others. Years ago I would spend saturdays browsing record shops. now I just buy records on amazon and play. The only things I have downloaded is from Naim since prefer a cd to an inferior download but since naim downloads are hi res I've downloaded a few. I really don't see a future for Hmv. Having said that there are a few independent record shops I still visit now and again and spend quite a bit.

Sad to see HMV go, considering how much of my money I have spent there over the past 20 years. That said, I seem to have bought most of my Cds from ebay, Amazon and Play.com, so I guess guys like me are to blame but given the prices they charged for music I was often curious about it was hardly a surprise.

I wonder if the end of HMv proves that physical media has had its day

Well at the end of the day it's quite simple.

I buy a lot of music. I'm a very keen photographer. I like watching movies.

Did I use HMV, Jessops or Blockbuster? No. Did I enjoy going into any of them when I did give them a try? No.

They didn't appeal to me for various reasons. Now for me and those like me (many photography forum contributors aren't overly weeping about Jessops either), this is what I spend my money on. And if music and photography are my core interests and I have money to spend on them but these firms don't appeal to me and others to go and spend my money on the stuff I'm interested in, they're doing it wrong.

Maybe now we'll get something better to fill their place.

Music and Photography......me too.  I spend money on the former but not on the latter.  I'm a fixed lens 1 body man.  The thing that annoys me is the cost of printer ink and, strangely, Jessops were often quite competitive here.

Why does it cost so much?

G

I was one of those husbands leading up to Christmas walking round. a shopping centre. Loaded with bags, struggling to get through door ways etc as people would not give way. Getting all stressed and then being charged a fortune for a coffee and car park. Next year none of that..all on line.

Times are a changing massively in the retail sector due to the internet. As more businesses disappear the remaining ones will have a massive challenge with increasing rent etc.

Shopping on a Saturday afternoon used to be a family outing...no more. 

What I do ponder on, does it matter about shops disappearing? Woolworths, have gone.Comet, HMV, etc. The world keeps turning, people adopt different habits. What does concern me is the casualties from all this...unemployment. 

Graeme. Printers work on the principle used by King Camp Gillette, the inventor of the safety razor. Gillette figured that as a razor was an infrequent purchase  and replacement blades were regular ones, it was best to lock the consumer into your system with very cheap razors and make money out of them by charging a premium for blades.

Same with printers - they are ludicrously cheap. HP, Epson, Lexmark, Canon etc make all their money on ink, not selling the printers themselves. Epson were/are the worst for this.

I remember some years back Marks & Sparks refused to take credit cards and left all their shops closed on Sundays. They did in the end see the error in their ways and changed things,if they had not it would have cost them a fortune in lost takings and PROFITS.

HMV and Blockbuster management need shooting for not keeping on top of things and changing with the times. I also feel very sorry for their staff if they have a family to support and a mortgage to pay.

Mista h

Interestingly, M&S closed on Sundays because they, like everyone else, had to close on Sundays (until the Sunday trading laws were reformed in 1992/3). They, along with John Lewis, resisted at first, but soon relented.

The refusal to take credit cards (apart from their own) was actually a rather canny decision. M&S were famous for paying suppliers as late as they could. By taking only cash, and paying their suppliers after 60 or 90 days, they were able make lots of interest on the huge piles of cash they were sitting on. Of course, when plastic became ubiquitous around 2000 they had to change and follow their customers.

PS - Looks like you've got the Mancs then Mista!

HMV are taking vouchers again, from tomorrow (Tuesday 22).

I heard today that there are currently approximately 50 offers on the table for HMV and a Canadian company looks like the leader... There may be life in the old dog yet but they will have to dump the old management, especially the one that came from Jessops.

Its been the same for centuries. If the Tolpuddle Martyrs had got their way, we probably wouldn't be discussing this on the internet. But I do sympathise with people who loose their jobs through no real fault of their own and I consider society has a responsibility to help them re-train and develop new ventures.

Cheers

Don

Ah yes forming a union would have prevented any new ideas from ever emerging eh?