HMV Death

[Link Prime]

The Irish consumer watchdog is advising anyone that purchased their vouchers through a credit card to contact their credit card company and arrange for the transaction to be reversed.
Not of use to me personally, but hopefully the majority of people that can do this do so.

[Mattofthespurs]

After reading this thread late last week I used up my remaining £50 I had on a gift card on Sunday.

Bought the latest Doctor Who and the 6 disc Superman blu ray set.

[Steve Green]

Itunes vouchers seem especially redundant - they produce a bit of plastic, which people travel to buy, to give to people to buy something virtual/electronically?

When i lost the cc i use for my itunes ac. - i could use cash to get a voucher...to get downloads - quite handy

I'm talking more about as presents.

If I'd lost my cc, buying stuff via itunes would be the last thing on my mind though.

[JTurner]

They're not accepting gift cards. Seems pretty sly to me that they continue to sell gift cards over the Xmas period while the management know that the chances of them being recouped are less than even.

Thieving c*nts.
Guess I should've spent that voucher on *anything* when I had the chance last week.

I will never shop here again, even if they pull out of this.

If they had stopped selling gift cards before Christmas what sort of message does that send when they are trying their best to avoid administration.

An honest one.

They'd have been better off, before the Xmas rush, to say 'We're in trouble, people, use us or lose us'.

I've actually seen businesses use that one - from library services to shops. Sadly it made no difference. These days people only seem to care for whatever savings they think that they can scrape and bugger the consequences. Once the place has gone then all the wailing and gnashing of teeth starts, but by then it's too late.

[JamesC]

They're not accepting gift cards. Seems pretty sly to me that they continue to sell gift cards over the Xmas period while the management know that the chances of them being recouped are less than even.

Thieving c*nts.
Guess I should've spent that voucher on *anything* when I had the chance last week.

I will never shop here again, even if they pull out of this.

If they had stopped selling gift cards before Christmas what sort of message does that send when they are trying their best to avoid administration.

An honest one.

They'd have been better off, before the Xmas rush, to say 'We're in trouble, people, use us or lose us'.

I've actually seen businesses use that one - from library services to shops. Sadly it made no difference. These days people only seem to care for whatever savings they think that they can scrape and bugger the consequences. Once the place has gone then all the wailing and gnashing of teeth starts, but by then it's too late.

Well this is the thing. High Street traders want shoppers to base their spending habits on emotional or ethical factors if the media footage is anything to go by.
But when HMV are selling off voucher cards knowing there's a good chance they'll be worthless in a couple of weeks it makes it hard to base your shopping habits on anything other than cold, hard, facts of business - online is cheaper.

[JTurner]

Read somewhere that one of the biggest streams of profit for shops is unredeemed vouchers.

It's interesting to think that the big monopolies - the monolithic corporations - will soon exist by and large online. I was in the Oxford Street megastore the other week and it dawned on me that there is such an overload of media for sale and that these stores are rivaling archives and libraries in terms of the space needed to display everything - and when they don't stock what you want, the customer is annoyed. Online is really the only way to go in such a bloated marketplace.  I can only hope that smaller specialist stores will continue to exist.

It's a sad thing, though. HMV was a fixture for me for a long time when I was growing up and buying music.

[Satanist]

First they came for Woolworths,
and I didn't speak out because the internet was cheaper.
Then they came for Zavvi,
and I didn't speak out because the internet was cheaper.
Then they came for HMV,
and I didn't speak out because the internet was cheaper.
Then they came for Forbidden Planet,
and I had to buy a tablet.

After the whole GAME nearly going down the toilet I told my family never to chance vouchers again.

[Spikes]

A friend who works in Jessops said someone came into his shop with £1500 on a gift card 2 hours after they went into administration. Now that guy is boned

Glad i managed to spend mine last week, and i had two quid left over - which id have put towards Dredd - if they had any BR's left to buy, that is.
Rather £2 lost than £1500!
Hope this does get resolved for those with un-spent vouchers, though.

[Buttonman]

The £1500 guy might have got it as an insurance settlement - rather than pay cash they give him a voucher for the value of his claim but snag a discount off the supplier.

I remember buying my first Playstation at HMV using vouchers a friend had been given in a settlement which he'd never got round to using and sold to me at a discount. Bet there are loads of people just remembering that £500 of vouchers in a drawer from that claim last year.

[Mattofthespurs]

Sadly it made no difference. These days people only seem to care for whatever savings they think that they can scrape and bugger the consequences.

Damn right too! Dunno if you've heard but the biggest recession in the last 100 years is on.
Any money I do have spare I look to maximise and very carefully at that.
Not my fault if a business does not recognise that and prepare for it. I mean, this recession has only been going on 3 years!

When I had plenty of cash spare I would hang the expense and buy from retailers who charged 10%-50% more than online retailers because I wanted the [whatever it was] now because I could afford it and they were happy to take my money and inflate their profit margin.

Times have changed and those greedy retailers are finding their backs to the wall.

Personally I say 'Fuck 'em'. You make hay whilst the sun shines but woe betide those that don't look to tomorrow. Like HMV.

[Mattofthespurs]

It's a sad thing, though. HMV was a fixture for me for a long time when I was growing up and buying music.

And so was vinyl and cassettes. Things move on. Shops, it appears, do not. And they go bust. Cry me a river.

Companies go under because they do not keep up with their customers needs. It's been happening for more years than I've been alive, and that's more than I'm willing to admit.

[Jimmy Baker's Assistant]

Gift vouchers aren't a scam but they are a foolish purchase.

Even if the chain doesn't go bust before you can spend them, vouchers all have expiry dates, typically two years from when you bought them. This is for a sensible reason - eg companies have to show unspent vouchers as a liability in their accounts - but the upshot is that loads of customers lose money on them.

As gifts go, Bank of England vouchers are always better. Except if they're iTunes vouchers bought with Tesco clubcard points, obviously.

[Richmond Clements]

It's a sad thing, though. HMV was a fixture for me for a long time when I was growing up and buying music.

And so was vinyl and cassettes. Things move on. Shops, it appears, do not. And they go bust. Cry me a river.

Companies go under because they do not keep up with their customers needs. It's been happening for more years than I've been alive, and that's more than I'm willing to admit.

Yup. HMV have a fucking idiotic pricing system. If it's in the sale, you'll usually find something at a fair price but everything else appears to be priced at random.
As I said before - there was a 5 year old Doctor Who DVD I saw at the weekend priced at £22. They deserve to go down for that sort of thing.

[Leigh S]

People blaming the internet might not remember that HMV were always overcharging buggers - Our price(?), Virgin, MVC, music zone etc were almost always cheaper and my low opinion of HMV was formed long before I'd heard of the world wide web.   They seemed to trade off their name and the fact that bewildered elderly relatives assumed that HMV were the only shop to sell vouchers.  I assume this kept them in business while other smaller but better/cheaper alternatives went to the wall.
 
That said, it will be sad to see them go -  so long as you were willing only to buy during a sale, they were a good place to browse about when you had no better shops to hit.

[a chosen rider]

It's a sad thing, though. HMV was a fixture for me for a long time when I was growing up and buying music.

And so was vinyl and cassettes. Things move on. Shops, it appears, do not. And they go bust. Cry me a river.

Companies go under because they do not keep up with their customers needs. It's been happening for more years than I've been alive, and that's more than I'm willing to admit.

Yup. HMV have a fucking idiotic pricing system. If it's in the sale, you'll usually find something at a fair price but everything else appears to be priced at random.
As I said before - there was a 5 year old Doctor Who DVD I saw at the weekend priced at £22. They deserve to go down for that sort of thing.

I'm still boggling from a year or so ago when I saw that HMV had the whole run of CSI season box sets - including the very earliest ones, literally ten years out of date - on sale at £48 each.  Box sets that were selling for a third of that online, and very readily available second-hand for under a tenner.  Utter madness.

I never had a problem paying maybe 10-20% extra to buy from the high street, especially for things that were brand new, but at some point HMV seemed to switch to a policy of keeping things at their full RRP forever except during temporary sales, and at the same time slashed the bredth and diversity of their stock to focus primarily on the same popular chart items you could get anywhere.  In the early 2000s I was in there buying all the time, but in the last five years or so they've almost never had something even slightly obscure I was looking for, and when they did it was at prices so much higher than the alternatives there was no way I could possibly justify it.