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Business News HMV Timeline Retail
HMV and WH Smith come bottom in high street retailer survey
By Chris Cooke | Published on Thursday 22 May 2014
Oh come on people, what happened to all the HMV love that was unleashed when we all thought the disc seller was heading to the high street in the sky?
The entertainment retailer has come third from bottom in a Which? survey of 12,500 shoppers in which they were asked to rate high street chains on various criteria, including overall satisfaction and how likely they were to recommend a store to friends.
HMV were third from bottom in the list of one hundred stores, ahead of only Homebase and one-time music seller WH Smith. Yep, Smiths came bottom; you’d think that with the hipster-led cassette revival, that 1980s-esque shopping experience WH Smiths offers consumers would be back in fashion. That’s probably unfair, I’ve not been in a Smiths in years – but the Catford branch used to be pretty grim.
Anyway, Smiths itself reckons that the nature of Which?’s survey goes against it. The company said in a statement: “This exercise is very misleading as WH Smith does not fit into any of the survey categories, while products like newspapers and magazines are not those that customers would ‘recommend’ a retailer for”.
It went on: “The 104 customers that [specifically] commented on WH Smith in this survey are not reflective of the twelve million customers that visit our stores each week, where our own independent survey of over a thousand customers continues to rate us highly”.
If you’re interested in the three highest scoring retailers, they were Lush, Disney Store and Richer Sounds. Last year’s overall winner, the Apple Store, slipped to thirteenth place. Apple needs to start selling blank cassettes and walkmans to win back those hipsters.
