You may spot a theme here.
HMV screws Irish customers over more than their UK ones.
CIE wants to screw us by increasing their fares again.
The ESB who are about to screw us all over with massive price hikes wants to buy an NI power company. Will it bring prices down? Not a chance. It means a bigger monopoly. Split them up like the consultants report said, Dempsey.
Oh look, now the English have seen they can screw us over.
And lastly, the Government have no balls and are only making a piecemeal effort to protect kids.
Totally agree with the HMV situation, in the last month or so I’ve bought a few albums and they are always, without fail, cheaper in Virgin. The Frank and Walters single, Miles and Miles, priced at the nice €1.99 in Virgin, is double the price in HMV!! And the silly thing is, that some people will just buy it in HMV without walking the 5 mins up to Virgin to check the price there. The mind boggles.
HMV have always been more expensive than Virgin. How they’re still in business is beyond me.
Virgin always has and always will be much better than HMV in every way.
I’m not prepared to defend HMV against online stores as Play and Amazon have a lot going for them, Play in terms of price, Amazon in terms of range of items on sale.
However, as far as HMV versus Virgin in Ireland is concerned, HMV – even the smaller branches – have a far, far superior range of specialist music. Time was that the Virgin Megastore on Aston Quay was the best record store in the country but that time was long, long before it closed. HMV Grafton Street is terrific on that front. Possibly if you have very, very mainstream tastes in music, you’ll laud Virgin. However, by and large, their selection of stock is noticeably more limited than HMV’s.
As a declaration of interest I’d like to add that most of the music I have acquired in the past year has been acquired from iTunes, Play, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr and the Virgin Megastore in the Louvre, or FNAC in Chatelet and LeClerc in Quimper, Brittany. As this is not my blog I will not whinge that even allowing for HMV’s better offering in terms of range, music stores in Ireland are generally pretty dreadful. Even supermarkets in France have a better selection.
HMV will go the way of Tower in the US – theyre closing principally because theyre just overpriced. serves them right.