Stop me if you’ve heard this one before! Looks like a rerun of the situation from last year with three store closures confirmed and another ten touch and go sadly.
HMV on the brink (again)
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HMV in Reading have also put up the “Store Closing – Everything Must Go” posters.
Although there is no news of when it is actually shutting – it might be another stand-off with the leaseholder to secure lower rent, as happened last February
Well them putting their prices up at Christmas worked then.
My pals distribution company has refused to supply them cos they rarely pay their bill’s and the stuff they return as slightly damaged is always trashed by staff slashing open the boxes.
I thought it closed months ago? Isn’t it in the Oracle?
Yes it’s in the Oracle – well it was just before Christmas.
Shut down at the start of this year when HMV tanked and was bought out.
Opened again in February after a “discussion” about rent in The Oracle.
It looked like it was going to be doing OK – the times I went in there it was always fairly busy, and they did actually have some stuff at comparable prices (rather than just shelves full of 3 For £20 or endless compilation sets)
One of the stores mentioned (Leeds) has been closing for 6 months. It finally closes next week. But they also opened a new store 5 minutes away were I presume the rent is cheaper.
I guess it’s them just playing hardball with the landlords.
When I was up in Nottingham for the ACR gig in December, I found Fopp (eventually) and spent 50 quid in a blink. If the store hadn’t been pulling the shutters down I’d have done some serious card damage. So I went to the HMV and found… nothing, a large store and more staff than customers (all browsing the £3 CD racks).
I was in Cambridge Fopp on the 27th and there was nothing in the Boxing Day sale which wasn’t already the same price the week before Xmas. And you can take 99% off the Robbie Williams CD and I still won’t buy it. Over the last 15 years I’ve always come out of there with either loads or nothing at all.
Been to a few of the sister stores here (Sunrise) over Christmas period. The one in the main downtown Ottawa location has closed down. Prices in other locations were very high. I did pick up a book that was on sale and have occasionally bought vinyl there when discounted.
They’re not on the brink at all, just closing a small number of stores. That they exist at all is nothing short of a miracle. I never buy music from tax dodging, zero hours high-street killing twats unlike most of you. All my mainstream musical Xmas presents came from HMV and all power to them – glad that’s still an option.
In Cambridge, I have found Relevant Record Cafe to often be cheaper than Am*z*n. Either the dodgers are taking the piss, or the cafe is subsidising the basement record shop.
What started a few years ago as s/h vinyl now includes new releases as well, with a stock on their Discogs store of 7250 or so, which I bet is more than Fopp. They host regular gigs, too. Definitely good eggs.
I second that sentiment. Relevant are great, and have pretty much cornered my spending on recorded music over the last few years.
Living where I do, I’m afraid I’m not going to spend half a day traveliing to the nearest city (where the parking charges are now prohibitive) on the off chance that HMV will have what I want. We used to have 3 indie record shops in my town, as well as W H Smith etc., but all we have now is a market stall which is mostly MOR music and second hand DVDs. The charity shops are worth a punt, and you all know the usual stuff you have to wade through, but that’s a different excercise. Yeah, I’ll always go into HMV Exeter if I’m there, and I wish them well, but times have changed.
I’m with you on this one @NigelT.
Much as I’d love to circumvent the dodgers (not to mention circumcise Bezos, the rat, for what he’s done to the high street generally – not just retail music outlets) there’s no realistic alternative if you live out in the sticks now that the high street has all but been destroyed. I’m faced with either ripping off the artists by torrenting everything, or making a 30 mile round trip on the off chance that something I want (almost invariably a non-civilian title) will actually turn up on a shelf. Too often, the dodgers are the only realistic avenue open to me.
The main tactic I have for avoiding the dodgers is to use Discogs, via which I’ve bought tons of stuff at sensible prices – where chancing piss-takers are often asking up to three figures for the same stuff on the Ama$on Marketplace – or else I go to the relevant label website directly – if I know which it is and if it even has one. A lot of reissue stuff comes out on a wide range of artisan labels, not all of which will ship to the UK.
Gosh, how fondly I remember the marvellous Catapilla records on North Street in Exeter, less than 100 yards from my bijou hovel in Lower North Street in the late 70s, and from where I’m sitting I can still gaze fondly at all the Island and Vertigo wonders I bought there for a couple of quid each when fashion victims were off-loading all their old stuff in order to buy noisy Punk crap. How I laughed gleefully as I squandered, er, wisely invested, my student grant buying vinyl which is now, on average, worth more than 30 times what I paid for it!
one thousand ups
The fact tthey just opened the biggest store in Europe in Birmingham doesnt suggest they are closing down. More likely closing stores where rent is high or footfall low or both.
Two in Birmingham now – would sacrifice one for a Fopp or a good independent.
“More likely closing stores where rent is high or footfall low or both.”
This is right. You’ll see the list in the article is pretty much all stores in shopping centres, which have notoriously high rents. It’s also an exercise in brinksmanship with the landlords – some will back down and the stores will stay open.
That’s good to know. Cambridge Fopp was one of the ones which opened a few weeks late due to rent renogiation, so I’m hoping it stays, even though I only seem to spend any money there every other visit.
Many of these ‘landlords’ are not really landlords at all, they’re pension funds and the like being run by accountants (who have their souls removed a la Northern Lights shortly before puberty).
We should have voted for Jeremy, he’d have nationalised the fuckers.
I just had a vision there of a nationalised record store industry…. I wonder what that would be like….?
Beatles compilation? Certainly sir, any colour you like as long as its Red.
The Reading store could do with moving elsewhere in town. Remodelling of the shopping centre has meant its lost two entrances and is now at a dead end.
Lost a bit of floor space too.
You’re right that it is a bit of a dead end location.
Maybe a move to Butts Centre would be good – cheaper rents, plenty of passing punters, and a new indie cinema, venue, art space thing is opening.
A town the size of Reading needs a big name store like HMV (although I will happily settle for a Fopp))
In Fopp, Cambridge Circus, tomorrow.
Always get something, probably two Zappas, one Blue Note and one of the few late 60s releases I haven’t got (last time, Soft Machine 2).
The HMV in Truro still clearly has too many DVDs and the expansion of their vinly section is, at best, optimistic; at worst (my opinion), pointless. Quite good on books.
The one I really don’t get is WH Smith.
In my local town, there are no record shops. Nor are there any record shops in the next three towns up country.
If WH Smith stocked the new releases by The Beatles (Abbey Road) and Bob Dylan (any Bootleg Series release), and the back catalogues of all the big players on CD, they’d make a killing, and the floor space taken up would be minimal.
Last time I looked they had 8 (E.I.G.H.T.) CDs.
A step up, I suppose, from the 3 (T.H.R.E.E.) they had in the summer.
Soft Machine 2 is my favourite Softs album. All the instrumental virtuosity on the subsequent albums is all very well but the Wyatt weirdness on this and their debut is icing on the cake, IMO.
W.H. Smiths are a strange retailer, these days. Smart in getting themselves into every UK airport and major railway station, where they have a captive market. Dumb as a rock in the crap that they stock. Even the big supermarkets in my area seem to have a better selection of books and magazines. I would hazard a guess they’d be losing money hand over fist here if they didn’t have the main local Post Office tucked away at the back. Captive market, yet again. Their staff seem to be the least motivated in the town too.
I seem to recall that WHSmiths stopped (or at least severely reduced) CDs and DVDs around the time that Woolworth tanked.
The WH Smith record department in Reading was bigger than Our Price in the mid-eighties.
Same at Ilford.
A great advantage over Our Price was that you could access 45s and check to see if they were OK – I don’t think that was the case in Our Price.
Presumably, also a great thing for shoplifters!
The WH Smith cull was down to Kate whassername, who took the business “back to basics” then f*cked off with a big golden tara. Depending upon your analytical bias, she’s either responsible for keeping them alive (partly true) or responsible for their down-market plummet into a garish Chinese tat outlet with nothing much going for it any more (also partly true).
I know this because I’ve worked for them a couple of times. Great people, great team, apparently hopeless senior management. British business to a T.
Incidentally, the business is split into 2 major divisions – Travel and High Street. It’s the Travel half – the airports and railway stations – that keeps the boat afloat. The Retail half has been losing ground year after year.
That’s interesting, the two divisions.
The “travel” part of it is genius, I have to admit. That taps into a very specific need – you are just about to embark on a long plane or train journey and you have some cash in your pocket and a desire for snacks, magazines and paperbacks. It’s a captive market really.
It’s how the company began. The high street portfolio came along much later.
Did you used to work on the videprinter? I still have nightmares remembering watching the wrestling and the score update popped up beneath it saying Reading 7 (SEVEN) Barnsley 0
I’d be happy with Reading 1 (ONE) Barnsley 0
That was the game where Clarkey took the players down the pit afterwards to show them how ‘normal’, less privileged people had to earn a wage.
Yep, and it was the last game of Clarkey’s career and the last game of 2 or 3 other players’ Reds careers. A couple more played no more than a couple more games for us, so within a few weeks of that game we pretty much had a new team. And what a team!
Blue Note alert – don’t go paying full whack for any single CD RVG Blue Note remasters right now – they are wading into the 5 album boxed set market like nobody’s business. You can now pick up oodles of great stuff in little five album boxes – micro reproductions of the original sleeves, no bonus tracks (who needs most of ’em anyway) and they all use the latest RVG remasters. Top result! Cheapo Blue Note jazz is my definition of a good buy.
Sad to see Byres Road Fopp in the firing line again. I haven’t spent much on music this year but most of it has been there.
Noooo! I hadn’t even clicked the article so I didn’t realise that was closing.
Very sad. The original Fopp, lest we forget. A real staple of my student days. A shame as well after it dodged the axe and resurrected itself a couple of years ago.
The signs went up just before Christmas, and it seems like there’s already a new tenant lined up.
https://www.glasgowlive.co.uk/news/glasgow-news/fopp-byres-road-close-end-17514398
I hadn’t even realised that. I suppose that sums up the problem – even though I was once an avid purchaser as a student, I no longer venture out to Byres Road much as it is too far away.
To be honest and objective about it, the city centre store is better anyway.
Leeds had 20% off everything last week in the store they’re closing, including sale stuff. Picked up the Kiwanuka CD for £3.99 and Beck’s new one on red vinly for £10.39
I do wonder if retail brinkmanship is HMV’s business model now.
Opening, closing and moving branches as their market dictates, according to footfall and running costs.