venta

Ceremonial trips to Fopp are cheaper :)

Though on my last visit to the Cambridge Circus Fopp in London, almost everything on the £3 bargain shelves was either stuff I really didn't care about, or stuff I already owned :)

From:

beckyc.livejournal.com

HMV moved to Fitzroy street though didn't it?

From:

lnr

Oh? I hadn't spotted it there! I might have to go look.

From:

uitlander

Yup. I'll be wandering down to have a sniff as well. Although maybe it's better to target our money at Fopp in the hope that it survives.

From:

huskyteer.livejournal.com

Damn.

This explains the email they've just sent me about their 'Blue Cross Sale'.

From:

They're feeling blue, you're feeling cross. I think that's the idea.

From:

hoiho.livejournal.com

And if HMV goes, it'll take Fopp with it (I imagine).

This may not happen: the Fopp brand seems to be more than a simple trading label of HMV. It' a discrete corporate entity called Fopp Entertainment Ltd (previously called Dillons, until 2007!). Hopefully they've structured the whole business group to be robust. Although if they haven't, and Fopp does go, Waterstones may not be far behind...

I'd miss Fopp: I've been buying stuff in their stores for 30 years.

From:

tigerfort.livejournal.com

HMV sold off Waterstones in 2010 to pay off some of their debts. (Sold it to the man who currently owns LJ, I believe.) So it won't be directly affected by their troubles.

From:

hoiho.livejournal.com

Did they? Oh, well, I was just judging they were still in the same group group by the fact they still seem to share a number of directors.

From:

Gosh, I didn't realise there were only 9 Fopps these days. I remember that the whole lot shut down and then a select few re-opened, but I didn't realise there were so few.

From:

Correction: 8 (http://www.foppreturns.com/stores/).

From:

mister-jack.livejournal.com

According to Wikipedia, Fopp has already gone into administration. The whole group has.

From:

Interestingly, http://hmv.com is displaying a notice of administration, but http://www.foppreturns.com/ isn't. I thought you were legally obliged to display that on your site if you were in administration (it's certainly what the company I worked for a few years back was told).

From:

emarkienna.livejournal.com

I agree it's sad - well, I suppose there are still plenty of places online to buy physical CDs, but as you say it's nice to browse, plus if you have an impulse buy, it's nice to have it immediately rather than wait for the post. HMV was also useful for DVD/Blu-rays.

As it happens, when I noticed the HMV had gone in Cambridge, opened opposite was Head[*] which as far as I can tell is a new independent CD shop. It was packed too. Though I fear that this isn't going to be a general trend.

* - Of course there's also the "Why can't they have a website, not a bleeding Facebook page" rant.

From:

As someone without a Facebook account, I quite agree!

Actually, apparently independent record shops are doing quite well at present - selling vinyl with added indie cred, and such. I don't know if it'll be a long term thing.

I don't really have a local independent, but do occasionally pop into Rough Trade East (in Brick Lane) and that seems to be booming away quite nicely.

From:

phlebas.livejournal.com

I'm the other way round - I tend to check the listings on Amazon each Monday to see what's out, then if there was anything interesting I'll head to HMV at lunchtime and see if they have it. Success rates have sharply dropped lately - they've stopped stocking anything they can't get on sale-or-return, for one thing - but I'd still prefer to buy from a human if I can. Newbury had a good independent record shop back in the day, but it closed down not long after HMV opened. The nearest one I now of now is in Guildford.

From:

octalbunny.livejournal.com

Do you have any info on how their sale-or-return works with administration?

I'm wondering if it might be better for an artist to have their CDs still on the shelves and later returned, rather than having the CD actually bought and the cash included in the administration pile.

From:

phlebas.livejournal.com

No idea of the details, I'm afraid - just a brief chat with someone at my local branch about why they weren't getting stock from certain distributors any more.

From:

I have heard speculation that whilst shops-as-mini-warehouses (that is, "traditional" shops) are on the way out, they may ultimately be replaced by shops-as-catalogues. People who want to browse things can turn up to these locations and paw through books, discover unexpected CDs and so on, then wave their phones like magic wands and the thing they've bought will be posted to them from a warehouse that has more than one copy.

If anything these might end up being better than old-style shops, because with less space devoted to inventory they can have more shelf space.

From:

Like a sort of neo-Argos. Could work!

Although Argos too are shifting an increasing proportion of stuff through their website these days.

From:

It's the opposite of Argos, actually. Argos shops have (almost) no products on the shelves but do keep stock for sale on site. These places would have shelves full of products, but no stock for sale on site.

From:

Oh... to me that seems like all the inconvenience of going to a physical location combined with all the inconvenience of having to wait for your goods to be posted. It's like the worst of both worlds!

From:

Well, if enough people agree with you then this approach will fail. :-)

It's not really the worst of both worlds, though. Because what it does achieve is to satisfy all the requirements in your original post above. Traditional shops may do this to your satisfaction, but if they can't stay solvent then how much people like them is irrelevant. After all, I like free cake, but that's not a viable business model either!

From:

Yes, I'd certainly be willing to experiment with these new places if they start showing up. Though I think calling them 'shops' would be a mistake. Maybe if I think of them as cool clubs to learn about new stuff they'll seem more appealing!

From:

Definitely possible. To start with, these places wouldn't be of great value to distributors because the whole point is that once you've found a product you can theoretically order from anyone online (this being the problem at the moment - people browse HMV then order on Amazon). So these places might be more like curated collections. The nicer they are to be in, the more coffee, cake, wine and so on they can sell to the people visiting.

From:

lnr

Urgh, except then you still need to deal with couriers!

From:

If they follow the nice-coffee-shop model

bateleur and I were talking about above, then maybe your new CDs/books could be delivered to the shop and you could pick them up the next day (and have more coffee and more cake and find more new things while you're there :)

From:

lnr

Not too bad for me - I live out of town but work fairly close and can pop in on lunch breaks, though it can be a bit draining. No good at all for Mike - who works even further from the shops than he lives!

From:

zenithed.livejournal.com

I gather Amazon are looking into having more physical places where you can pick things up, looks like you can do it at corner shops already: http://crave.cnet.co.uk/gadgets/amazon-extends-collection-points-to-4500-convenience-stores-50008955/ Does rely on there being one of the signed up ones nearby though.

From:

This is one of the few areas where it seems I'm quite modern: I haven't been into a High St record shop in years and years. I get generic stuff online, and interesting stuff from independents. I do still buy CDs where possible rather than files, but I don't feel the need to physically paw them first.

From:

I don't necessarily feel I need to paw things I know I want. It's the wandering through a shop and picking up interesting-looking stuff I haven't heard of, or reading the staff recommendations that Rough Trade dot about the shop that I enjoy and use to find new stuff. I know there are about a million different online mechanisms for this, but I don't feel any of them have gelled with me in quite the same way.

From:

I guess I never really paid much attention to staff recommendations or what was playing in the shop and so on, even in the pre-internet days: I mostly came across new stuff via friends or via the NME etc. So now it seems quite natural to do so via friends and via a few blogs that I follow.

(Not sure why I should be more cynical or resistant to what shop staff try to push on me vs what journalists try to push on me, but somehow that's the way.)

From:

In case anyone's curious: 3 CDs and a graphic novel, £20. And I was unexpectedly vox pop'd by a lady from Magic FM as I left the Oracle shopping centre. HMV seemed pretty busy - though I've no idea how busy it ought to be at 10am on a Tuesday.

I'm also under the impression Magic FM is London-based, so not totally sure why they'd be pouncing on people in Reading.

Edited Date: 2013-01-15 11:27 am (UTC)

From:

octalbunny.livejournal.com

London Oxford Street already had at least two TV crews. OTOH, it was surprisingly short of "in administration" signs (none outside).

From:

howlin-wolf-66.livejournal.com

My local branch went around three years ago...

I'm still in mourning.

From: