HMV

HMV has a strong resonance in my life and its disappearance will not only severely damage our shopping centres but also leave a significant gap in their offer. My father was a DJ in the 1950's and early 1960's and he kept a large collection of 78rpm records in a box in the hall. Record labels were colourful items in the drab 50's with labels like Parlophone, Columbia, Brunswick, Regal and Capitol but it was His Master's Voice that captured my attention. Why was a dog listening to Joe Loss or Perry Como? HMV may have been barking then but now they have fallen over the retail cliff.

I still have the remaining collection of 78rpm records and they provide the soundtrack of my childhood from Guy Mitchell, Petula Clarke and Alma Cogan to Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Doris Day and Eddie Calvert. Only Ella Fitzgerald still gets played. Every Saturday evening a taxi arrived to collect my father and take him to some dance hall, hospital or event. I loaded the taxi whilst he searched for his playlist and overcoat. He would set up his twin Connoisseur record turntables, wire up his speakers, microphone and decks to the amplifier and organise the dancing. It brought in about £2 per week, a 20% increase in his weekly wage although 10/- was usually set aside for new or replacement records, shellac 78s broke easily. During the Christmas party season he would run company children's parties and I was usually taken along to be the stooge demonstrating the Hoola Hoop, the Twist or whatever the latest craze was. He displayed an advert for HMV below his record decks and a generation of youngsters probably wondered why a dog was barking into a funnel.

The collapse of high street retailing is now in full flood.  The early loss in the last month of Comet, Blockbuster and Jessops came as no great surprise, although Jessops will be missed and leaves a gap in photographic retail outlets. But the loss of HMV is a different matter, I had shopped here for years, more than 50% of my CDs, DVDs and the unrecyclable pile of VHS videos came from HMV. I had bought presents from HMV the week before Christmas. This was far worse than losing Woolworths or Habitat which had outlived their time. HMV on the other hand was at the epicentre of a fast changing industry. Their shops have always been one of the anchors in any major shopping mall and they are usually crowded. I suppose that like many others I was seduced into buying CDs and DVDs online but I stopped using Amazon three years ago when they transferred their media sales to the Channel Isles to avoid paying taxes. Too late, they had eaten into HMVs margins and one of the few chain shops on the high street worth visiting for browsing and buying had closed its doors.

The accelerating decline of British retailers is damaging the vitality of our towns and cities and seriously reducing jobs. They were always going to decline when the internet became a trusted means of shopping.  Who wants to tramp round the same set of chain shops, pay for parking and waste time when you could be doing something useful. Give me some distinctive indigenous shops which help the customer and do repairs any time.  The chain stores became guilty of frisking the credit card set by importing cheap goods, marking up prices and cashing the difference. Britain may once have been a nation of shopkeepers but the internet global players have cut out the middleman (retail businesses) as well as the taxman.

An analysis of retailers going bust carried out by the British Retail Consortium reveals that the collapse is accelerating again after a recovery in 2009 and 2010. Recovery from the recession of 2008 seemed to be well underway until 2010 but with stagnant wages, rising inflation, higher unemployment and less secure and often part time jobs; people have reeled in their spending. At least one in ten shops are now empty, the Specials will soon be re-releasing 'This town is coming like a Ghost Town', although you will need to download it because almost all the record shops have been closed down.

Retailers going out of business
Year             Companies     Stores    Employees

2007            23                    2600      14083
2008            54                    5793      74579
2009            37                    6536      26688
2010            26                      944      10930
2011            31                    2469      24025
2012            54                    3951      48142

2011 was the year when the coalition government's austerity measures began to kick in and if shopping is a measure of our economic prosperity then we are in deep shit. There are more than 40,000 shops which are empty and that is not including all the charity shops and pawnbrokers that are now squatting in our town centres. Some serious thinking is required, not on how to relet the shops, but on how to redevelop our town centres so that they provide more housing, community run services and small business spaces that generate footfall and create the sense of place.

A sense of place was the last thing in the minds of the property speculators over the past decade as they bullied planning authorities to give permission for the demolition of traditional properties to create space for pumped up retail developments. They may have temporarily hiked their rental streams but in so doing they wiped out the small independent shops that gave a place its identity. Whatever happens next I hope that HMV is resurrected perhaps with a more politically correct name.