HMV, soon to be no more

Made good use of my day doing chores areound the house.  Did all my ironing, a bit of painting and some general cleaning.

Watched the budget and the only surprise was the 1p off a pint of beer.  That should save me about 50p a year.  On the other hand by my reckoning 10p on a bottle of wine will cost me about £10.40 a year.  Also, I can look forward to a maximum of 1% pay rise for the next 3 years so I should be amongst the front runners in the race to the bottom.  I suppose least it means I don't lose much pay when I go on strike so it's not all bad.

Picked Shamila up from work and went over to Teesside Park to do a bit of shopping.  She went to M&S and Argos and I detoured to HMV, probably for the last time.  I normally just browse but on this occasion the "closing down sale" discount brought the CD's down to what I would pay on the Internet so I bought a couple of CDs for old time sake.  Bought The Stand In by Caitlin Rose which was on my to buy list anyway and Standing at the Sky's Edge by Richard Hawley.

HMV was never my favourite shop to be honest.  I remember when it was near the Lord Raglan on Newport Road.  It closed and we were without an HMV in Middlesbrough for quite a few years.  Not really sure what that was all about, but we had a lot of record shops then so it was probably the competion (then it was Dean Wycherley's Record Shop,  now it's Amazon, maybe things  haven't changed so much).  There was a branch in Stockton though and it was pretty good for a while.  Blank Frank, the former Blitzkrieg Bop singer worked there. I seem to remember he ran the singles section and it was at cutting edge for post punk for a while. 

HMV eventually re-opened in Middlesbrough and until the Internet took hold of my music buying habit I bought a lot of my mainstream music there. Sadly they never had decent world music or reggae sections so I often trekked up to Alan Fearnley's or had to buy mail order.  Part of the problem was the branches were no longer allowed to be autonomous.  It was clear that everything became ran from the centre and what little personal touch they had was lost.

So their presence on the High Street has gone the same way as other national chains, Our Price and Zavvi/Virgin to name but two.  Ironically HMV bought some Zavvi stores when it went under back in 2009. That was a quick turnaround in its fortunes. 

No doubt the name will live on though.  According to the NME the Administrator wants to sell whatever shops are left by 25 March.  No doubt it will be purchased by venture capitalists and I suspect they will run HMV mainly as an Internet operation possibly with a few flagship shops dotted around our major cities. 

We've lost 3 branches in the area and probably about 20 jobs will go.  Teesside could have done without that.  But as a music buying junkie I know it's not trendy or cool but the Internet satisfies my needs.  I can get pretty much anything available and if it's been deleted I just put it in my eBay list and I get an email when somebody is selling a copy.

So on a personal level am I bothered?  I'm not a hypocite, so no.

PS according to spell check all is ok.  I doubt that very much but who am I to argue.