Another high street store gone

barnstorm

Hollywood Music in Milton Keynes is no more. I was on the mailing list as it's reasonably close to me, although I must confess I only visited a couple of times when I happened to be passing.

'Hello. I'm very sorry to tell you that Hollywood Music has now ceased trading. The current economic climate has devastated high street sales with many people cutting back on their spending for even essential items. You probably see from the news how many retail businesses are failing, whatever their size. We are one more of those casualties.



We've had a good run though, with loads of fantastic instruments and customers passing through the shop. We really appreciate your loyalty over the years and hope you can find an alternative source for your musical needs.
Take a look at our Facebook page and all the kind comments that have been left for us. Add one yourself if you feel inclined!



Finally, some shops blame the internet for their woes! Well I don't. We have done quite well online with our website and Reverb.com channel but even those have seen a drop in sales in the past six months. If you don't mind me getting a little bit political, the state of the economy, thanks to Brexit, is the real culprit.

You will be able to buy some great stuff at fantastic prices at the online auction being run by Eddisons until 6PM WEDNESDAY 24 JULY 2019.'

Here's a link to the auction if anyone wants a look: https://auctions.eddisons.com/auctions/7147/eddiso10522

lovestrat74

Sad times. Brexit... Biggest waste of tax payers money in my lifetime and it ain't going to get any better soon 

darthed1981

lovestrat74 said:

Sad times. Brexit... Biggest waste of tax payers money in my lifetime and it ain't going to get any better soon 

Wisdom

mrkb

I visited a few times, but they didn’t stock much that caught my eye. That’s the trouble with smaller shops now, a few beginners guitars and lower end PRS and very little that you can’t try elsewhere.

Actually it was the other store on the industrial estate in wolverton I was thinking of, Hollywood Music was slightly better, but still nothing that made me want to try it out.

JezWynd

I don't believe Brexit is responsible for the death of the high street and retail stores in general. It obviously hasn't helped the situation but the real reason is simply on-line shopping.

Jalapeno

mrkb said:

I visited a few times, but they didn’t stock much that caught my eye. That’s the trouble with smaller shops now, a few beginners guitars and lower end PRS and very little that you can’t try elsewhere.

Pretty much like when I started decades ago, though there were far more stores about, people just didn't travel miles to check out other stores. Watford had 3, one a second had store, it hasn't had any for over a decade.

If you want top-end gear you HAVE to try the bigger outlets or boutiques IMHO.

Philly_Q

I don't know if Brexit is contributing to the death of the high street - it hasn't even happened yet - but I do wonder if there's a degree of anxiety about Brexit, maybe even subconsciously, which is curbing spending on "luxuries".

mbe

JezWynd said:

I don't believe Brexit is responsible for the death of the high street and retail stores in general. It obviously hasn't helped the situation but the real reason is simply on-line shopping.

Same here, I don't think Brexit is entirely to blame for failed retail businesses. I think it's more likely due to the consequences of austerity.

Not enough money in people's pockets and credit cards maxed out after wage freezes, wage compression, ever higher private sector rents, higher food prices and energy costs. 

The folks who have money saved earn less interest than the rate of inflation and try to hang on to their nest eggs as a cushion against the next inevitable financial shock,

Nikc

JezWynd said:

I don't believe Brexit is responsible for the death of the high street and retail stores in general. It obviously hasn't helped the situation but the real reason is simply on-line shopping.

I don't think its either - On line has provided an option that was not there before, Brexit is having a big effect on sales and the economy (the motor trade is on its arse) - however what has is wiping out the high street is a combination of factors. Ridiculous rates and rents but also piss poor service in so many shops and a lack of selling - you know getting stuck in and selling the product showing some interest in the consumer and meeting their needs. Rant off  

As an aside I don't doubt the current market has taken its toll on Hollywood Music and I feel for them but, better for them to make the decision than it be made for them

fandango

Philly_Q said:

I don't know if Brexit is contributing to the death of the high street - it hasn't even happened yet - but I do wonder if there's a degree of anxiety about Brexit, maybe even subconsciously, which is curbing spending on "luxuries".

Try telling that to those who opened their wallets for Gibson R8’s and R9’s within the last year or so. No holding back there.

barnstorm

fandango said:

Philly_Q said:

I don't know if Brexit is contributing to the death of the high street - it hasn't even happened yet - but I do wonder if there's a degree of anxiety about Brexit, maybe even subconsciously, which is curbing spending on "luxuries".

Try telling that to those who opened their wallets for Gibson R8’s and R9’s within the last year or so. No holding back there.

Leaving aside the reasons for both, price hikes and the weakness of GBP over the past couple of years have led to a ‘new normal’ for lots of guitars and related products that I’ve personally struggled to accept, and I’ve spent very little recently as a result. The R8/R9 sales presented a welcome chance to buy at prices that many still regard as just about fair.

(Edit to clarify that I wasn’t an R8/R9 buyer.)

darthed1981

barnstorm said:

fandango said:

Philly_Q said:

I don't know if Brexit is contributing to the death of the high street - it hasn't even happened yet - but I do wonder if there's a degree of anxiety about Brexit, maybe even subconsciously, which is curbing spending on "luxuries".

Try telling that to those who opened their wallets for Gibson R8’s and R9’s within the last year or so. No holding back there.

Leaving aside the reasons for both, price hikes and the weakness of GBP over the past couple of years have led to a ‘new normal’ for lots of guitars and related products that I’ve personally struggled to accept, and I’ve spent very little recently as a result. The R8/R9 sales presented a welcome chance to buy at prices that many still regard as just about fair.

(Edit to clarify that I wasn’t an R8/R9 buyer.)

Yup, also it's fair to say nobody who spends 2.5k on a guitar is an average consumer.

jeztone2

JezWynd said:

I don't believe Brexit is responsible for the death of the high street and retail stores in general. It obviously hasn't helped the situation but the real reason is simply on-line shopping.

It’s more complex than that.

In many provincial cities in the North & Midlands the biggest employer has been the public sector. Which has had a decade of wage freezes. So if you were on £30k in 2008, your likely to be on about £34K now. But in inflationary terms £30K in 2008 is the equivalent to £39K now. So your schoolteacher or nurse is £5K down. 

This seems to be something no one in politics wants to talk about. But the last decade has been pretty hard on the lower middle class. Factor in housing costs and utilities  and it’s simply a case of the high street chasing less customers with less money. Meanwhile the taxpayer subsidises low paid work to the tune of £11 Billion a year.

I found some old payslips when I moved house two years ago. From back in the day when I sold TV’s and Stereo’s. After going on the BoE inflation calculator. I discovered my not quite £10K PA in 1993 was the equivalent of nearer 20 grand now. A sales person in Curry’s makes what £14,500.00? Which makes sense as I paid rent, went out three times a week & could afford pretty good guitar gear. All without parental help. 

We’ve has twenty years of wage erosion mainly caused by corporations exploiting working tax credits and the myth of austerity. It’s just this 1% narrative on spongers and greedy union barons that’s distracted people. Brexit is yet another distraction to add to it. I mean in 1986 a JVC video recorder was £599, that’s about £2K in today’s money. But 45-50% of the population owned one. 

NelsonP

The spectre of Brexit has certainly led to increased prices. But I'm not sure it's the only reason why high st retailers are suffering. Austerity, increased prices due to currency devaluation, Amazon and online sales in general, new marketing needed via social media, poor planning for car parking based on exploiting the 'evil polluting motorist' have all created the perfect storm for high st retail.

Not sure how representative the stock in the liquidation auction is, but by looking at it I'd say this retailer also suffered from having a somewhat limited range.

prowla

The High Street was "dying" before brexit came along, so that's just a flag of convenience.

Traffic rules, paid parking, draconian parking laws - they all deter people from going to the shops.

Shops themselves are unimaginative and very samey from one town to the next, so there's nothing really to see if you do go out. There are towns with no shops at all which would entice me to make the effort to go there.

Council rates impact shops profitability.

We've then got competition from online shopping and supermarkets; if the shops aren't competitive then that ain't going to sell stuff.

Other considerations, such as the big guitar companies dictating stocking requirements which make it untenable for small dealers to run their product.

There are lots of factors.

barnstorm

NelsonP said:

Not sure how representative the stock in the liquidation auction is, but by looking at it I'd say this retailer also suffered from having a somewhat limited range.

Not very representative, if memory serves; I assume the decision to shut up shop wasn’t made overnight and that they’ve been getting rid of stock for a few weeks, at least.

When I last went (a couple of years ago now) they had a selection of Fenders and Gibsons (no CS stuff) and some Ricks in addition to the usual starter instruments and a few second-hand guitars, so it was decent if not hugely exciting.

Not sure if their guitar sales had suffered any more or less than their keyboard/drum/studio sales; I don’t have any sense of how the non-guitar bits of the MI retail industry are doing.

p90fool

prowla said:

The High Street was "dying" before brexit came along, so that's just a flag of convenience.

Traffic rules, paid parking, draconian parking laws - they all deter people from going to the shops.

Shops themselves are unimaginative and very samey from one town to the next, so there's nothing really to see if you do go out. There are towns with no shops at all which would entice me to make the effort to go there.

I agree, town centres have become so samey it's not worth trying to park. If you look above ground floor level our cities are unique and interesting, but retailers have effectively killed that at street level. 

Hopefully high street rents will crash when there are not enough surviving chain stores to occupy them, and smaller, one-off businesses will be able to move back in. 

Walking the arcades in Cardiff for example is a pleasant, interesting experience (though a little heavy on coffee shops), but out in the main shopping areas you could be in Exeter, Aberdeen or Ipswich, so why on earth does anyone bother?

Snags

I love all the "Oh it's not Brexit, it's online/high street decline" comments.

The Hollywood Music letter explicitly states that they had previously decent online outlets as well. They weren't just relying on footfall and local people. It might be nice to give the author some credit for knowing their own sales breakdowns, and also at what point they started to see everything tailing off across the board.

I'd agree that to some extent "Brexit" is a flag of convenience. But only as a shorthand for the way in which successive governments have screwed the economy with ever-more destructive policies and actions designed to appease/placate/appeal to a fairly small number of very economically right-wing interests, and in particular the way the Conservatives have been ready collectively to put party before country time and time again. If Brexit isn't the single neatest encapsulation of that, I don't know what is.

(And no, this isn't a party political rant, as such - I'm equally appalled by the tossers on the vanished centre and the left who have been so utterly ineffectual, to the point of active collusion, in countering the bullshit narrative of neo-liberal economics and all the detritus that goes with it).

TheBigDipper

p90fool said:

<snip>

I agree, town centres have become so samey it's not worth trying to park. If you look above ground floor level our cities are unique and interesting, but retailers have effectively killed that at street level. 

Hopefully high street rents will crash when there are not enough surviving chain stores to occupy them, and smaller, one-off businesses will be able to move back in. 

Walking the arcades in Cardiff for example is a pleasant, interesting experience (though a little heavy on coffee shops), but out in the main shopping areas you could be in Exeter, Aberdeen or Ipswich, so why on earth does anyone bother?

My wife is an enthusiast about interesting buildings. She's been saying this for years and pointing it out to me - someone who has to be forced to look higher than the ground floor. Christchurch High Street is a classic example - interesting buildings but blighted by cheap unimaginative shop fronts that are not in keeping with the buildings they're in. 

High street "shopping" seems to be a leisure experience for most, these days. People might buy a coffee and cake, but rarely anything else. The ability to park (or not) dictates where drivers go and shop for their weekly groceries. For nearly all places, out-of-town shopping parks are where you find the generic supermarkets and clothing stores, not town centres. Large cities do have viable city centres, but the shoppers are often either people who work in the centre Mon-Fri, or tourists who are visiting. 

The Bournemouth-Christchurch-Poole conurbation (catchy, eh?) is bigger than the nearest city (Southampton) but all three towns have failing town centres and out-of-town competition that their respective councils (at the time) supported, so go figure... . 

Regarding rates, IIRC, business rates are set by central government, not the local council, so there's no opportunity for them to adjust the rates charged to a business on their high street to help them compete with out-of-town or Internet. And if they did, there'd be nothing to stop the landlords from increasing rents at renegotiation time because the retailer now has more income to play with. Which they may not get, and so the cycle continues with shops leaving the high street and being replaced by?.... 

Three-ColourSunburst

fandango said:

Philly_Q said:

I don't know if Brexit is contributing to the death of the high street - it hasn't even happened yet - but I do wonder if there's a degree of anxiety about Brexit, maybe even subconsciously, which is curbing spending on "luxuries".

Try telling that to those who opened their wallets for Gibson R8’s and R9’s within the last year or so. No holding back there.

I would say that the 'R fest' has a lot more to do with human psychology than economics.

As the saying goes 'people can't resist a bargain' and research shows that, when faced with the prospect of getting a perceived 'bargain', many people all-but lose their ability to evaluate whether or not what is on offer is objectively good value or not (or even whether they can really afford it) with powerful psychological rewards associated with getting a 'bargain' becoming even more important than the financial aspects of the purchase.

For example, a 'bargain' price makes the buyer feel that they are in control of the transaction, rather that the seller (who is unable to demand the usual price); that they the sort of person who enjoys good fortune; that they are 'smart' consumers, and so on. Add in an element of peer-group reinforcement and a bit of competition for the 'best' buys and the 'R fest' looks not totally dissimilar to the rush of shoppers at a Black Friday sale!

bobblehat

With regards to the decline of high street music retailers specifically. IMO I think its a combination of online competition and a more general decline in musicians/customers. 20 years ago there would have been at least half a dozen pubs within 15 minutes of my house with live music on a Friday night. These days you will struggle to find any. (pubs or musicians )That's a lot of potential customers .
There's also plenty of evidence in these threads that many of the retailers don't help themselves with poor stock, badly set up out of tune instruments and poor customer service.