moontheloon
Posts: 6170
Joined: 30/9/2005
From: Birmingham
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Professor Moriarty
quote:
ORIGINAL: James2183
Sorry Moon 
With the news that gift vouchers are going to be void I can only hope customers will try and look past this and realise that 4000 people are probably going to lose their jobs.
I'd be pretty pissed if I'd bought a voucher for someone, or been given one for X-mas. I know its not the fault of the staff and their attitude would quite rightly be "why do I give a stuff about your voucher, I'm out of a job", but it still feels a bit like robbery to me. You took my money and didn't give me the value of the goods in exchange. If I had one I'd be picking up whatever I wanted from the store of the voucher value and then leaving the vouchers at the counter and walking out.
Someone did just this today, and it is my job to deal with people like this in the store. So after much pleading with the customer not to do something he would regret he snatched the goods out of the guy serving him's hand, threw his gift card on the floor and marched out of the shop. I radioed in the police, but before they arrived he came back to the store, had another confrontation with me and threw the goods at my feet and snatched his gift card back off me. The police had a chat with him, but as far as I was concerned we had the goods back so it went no further.
I understand the frustration of not being able to spend your gift vouchers. It seems wrong to me that this is the case, and yet the staff are not lying to you when they say there is nothing they can do. We are powerless. Some of the staff at my store have gift vouchers we cannot use either, myself included. It's a really shitty situation that I would do anything to get out of. Things customers need to understand is that the staff selling them the gift cards were not aware we would be going into administration. We were given no heads up, no warning, we learned everything from the news last night, and that includes store managers and we even suspect our regional manager.
We don't know what will happen and have been urging our customers to keep hold of their vouchers in the hope that we pull through. If we do then hopefully we can start accepting vouchers again, if not then I know you can lodge a claim with the administrators, though I realise this doesn't always yield results.
In our store the first two hours were hell, we received a lot of abuse from angry customers who I can honestly say we genuinely empathise with, but there is no need to become rude and aggressive with us. The rest of the day was odd though, we had a lot of people coming in and wishing us well. It was very nice, but also really felt like the end.
The thing that I find shocking is the lack of communication from up on high. First thing we did this morning was get all the staff together and compile a list of questions that we had about administration, these ranged from whether we would get paid on time, what can we do about warranties on products for customers, can we use a customers deposit on one item against another item so we're not technically giving them a refund but they don't lose out and so forth. Our manager went on a conference call armed with a list of questions that would have helped us do our job and helped put customers at ease. Yet the call was simply a sit and listen call, no managers were given an opportunity to ask anything and to be quite honest we are still trying to work out the answers to many of the questions we had.
Even if I did not work for HMV I would feel sad for its passing. Yes it was a terrible move to go into technology and fashion when they should have been concentrating on a strong diverse back catalogue for our core customers, and yes we could have done with taking a leaf out of Fopp's book and worked with smaller distributors to get great deals on interesting titles (I love going into Fopp and finding all their BFI titles are dirt cheap). But despite it's flaws it was still a great place to browse and find some damn decent films and normally good prices. I know some of the prices are outrageous. Believe me when I say the staff are as shocked at some of the prices as you are, but usually these titles end up being sent to us in a campaign at some point to rectify it.
I can only hope that the strong support we received from customers today, whether it was panic buying or genuine support, continues and it inspires a millionaire with more money than sense to invest in us, not just for my job and others like me, but because seeing HMV go would be a crying shame. I don't enjoy online shopping, regardless of how cheap it is, I would rather pay more and browse the racks, and that has been my attitude for a few years now.
Anyway. It's been a tough long day and this is an issue obviously close to my heart so I don't know if what I am saying makes much sense.
_____________________________
A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night and in between he does what he wants to do
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RE: Another one bites the dust - 
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