Topic: Jessops Birmingham

[Mike (happyforest)]

Just in case you've missed it. Peter Jones has opened some old Jessops stores today. Including the what was the Birmingham store in cherry street, just a minutes walk away from where I work.

So I took the opportunity to have a look at what they were doing.  Doesn't appear to be much different to what was there before, slight rearrangement of the layout.

The film storage was behind the printing counter, which was looking a bit sorry for itself as the only film available was a small but comprehensive selection of Ilford films, mainly it appeared to be 35 mm.

Being generous, I think I will let them settle down before I see if they will provide chemicals etc.

I hope that they do well, for the sake of photography in general, but realise they are never going to return to the good old days of an A3 price list.

Mike

[LT]

Good luck to him, and them. Maybe a smaller range of stores is the answer?

[LEAFotography]

That sounds like an opportunity opening up there, thanks for posting this news.

I'm not sure who Peter Jones is though, so excuse me if I'm only one. I wonder what he'll do with the store.  Hopefully film users/wasters who shop there will ask for and buy film. That might be the stores only encouragement to stock and sell a range.  Some of the limitations of 'chains' is the policy tie-in to certain products they buy in bulk to sell competitively.  Independent traders can set their own stock approach giving them more scope, to stock films, new/old film cameras etc rather than 'pushing' digital for example.
At the moment I get 95% via post from suppliers who have the range of film I want, including the world supermarket e-thingy. In town though, film ranges in the local shops is definitely getting better, which I'm encouraging where I can. One even sold me some much discounted Fuji NPC160 that expired in 2005!  As a filmwaster I'd rather go to a shop in a small side street with good range of E6, C41 and B/W film, reasonably priced, than to a High Street store that only sells Fuji Sensia 200 and Kodak 400CN, though I like those films.

I wish them well with reading a viable market and making a go of it.

[sapata]

I wish Peter Jones best of luck (if he actually needs any as he's a millionaire already!) Anyways... no matter what they change at Jessops it would fail if they carry on with their poor customer services... that's my view. They lost me for the online market and I'm sure that happened to many people.

[salvo]

just seen it

http://www.petapixel.com/2013/03/28/jessops-reopening-thirty-plus-stores-aims-for-apple-esque-sleekness/

"The Reality TV star is offering many of them their jobs back, re-staffing about 500 of the 1,300+ jobs that were lost when the chain closed all of its 187 stores.

The new stores will feature several Apple-style improvements, including “play tables” where you can try and compare cameras and plans for a “Jessops Academy” for one-on-one classes."

[Late Developer]

I'm sure we all want the UK economy to recover and it would be extremely useful to have a chain of photographic goods retailers that runs the length and breadth of our country as an unexpected source of replacement jobs. However, something radical needs to change for Jessops to succeed and there's a part of me that would prefer it if they'd just continue down the route of "digital only".

I know before their latest demise they sold a token amount of film and associated kit - but the last thing we need is a chain of 130 stores stepping into the territory of the current range of independent and small chain stores that supply our present film needs.

If Jessops starts under-cutting what we have now, there may be a brief, marginal financial benefit - but what if they go under, again? The last thing we need is fewer independents selling a reduced range of films, chemicals and papers as a result of a failed Jessops business model in future. Is there coming a time when we need to hope for film consumables to be sold "direct"?

I'm usually a "glass half full" sort of person but I'm not seeing any evidence that the lanky one out of "Dragon's Den" knows enough about photographic goods retailing to treat it anything other than a commodity market like baked beans. Heaven help him if he re-recruits the dead-heads we had to suffer in the stores prior to them going under....