HMV in administration AGAIN

csgohan4

Arklight wrote: »

It's probably hard to compete with Amazon when you have to pay tax on all your profits but they pay tax on a tiny percentage of their profits and base themselves in Luxembourg where the business tax rate is 3%.

amazon isn't to blame for using legal ways of reducing tax. Blame the government for not updating their complicated tax structure

jonnygee2

HMV are an early (and unsurprising) victim. There'll be more soon.

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

Arklight wrote: »

It's probably hard to compete with Amazon when you have to pay tax on all your profits but they pay tax on a tiny percentage of their profits and base themselves in Luxembourg where the business tax rate is 3%.

The corporate tax issue is a total red herring.

It's only paid on profits, and profits are a tiny proportion of most businesses turnover, and their much larger other expenses include vast sums paid to government in all the other taxes they pay.

Read a Wetherspoons annual report one day if you want a bit of enlightening, they pay over 50% of turnover to the government in various taxes, before they pay the corporation tax on the roughly 5% of turnover left over as 'profit'.

kabayiri

Arklight wrote: »

It's probably hard to compete with Amazon when you have to pay tax on all your profits but they pay tax on a tiny percentage of their profits and base themselves in Luxembourg where the business tax rate is 3%.

You can't compete if you don't have a compelling vision.

Amazon, it seems, are guilty of giving consumers what they appear to want.

I bet many on here have an Amazon Prime subscription. It's all part of the one family shopping initiative.

Regardless, I still don't understand what HMV's longer term business model was about.

csgohan4

kabayiri wrote: »

You can't compete if you don't have a compelling vision.

Amazon, it seems, are guilty of giving consumers what they appear to want.

I bet many on here have an Amazon Prime subscription. It's all part of the one family shopping initiative.

Regardless, I still don't understand what HMV's longer term business model was about.

Like Toys R us they didn't change with the times and focussed on bricks and mortar heavily and joined the online bandwagon too late.

I shop at amazon because it's cheaper than most and you can track prices to alert you when under a certain level, camelcamel

Consumers are not a charity for shops, if everyone sells X but Amazon offers it for less, I would gladly pay less

Thrugelmir

csgohan4 wrote: »

Consumers are not a charity for shops, if everyone sells X but Amazon offers it for less, I would gladly pay less

Always been discounters in the retail sectors. Amazon won't be interested in anything that doesn't sell in volume. As far as music goes. I buy the majority either direct from artists at gigs I attend or through Pledgemusic.

stator

Amazon aren't that great. Always find their prices are high but people buy from there anyway because it's easy, especially when everyone makes an amazon wish list for christmas.


I miss the likes of Play.com, TheHut and ChoicesDirect, offering real competitive prices.

[Deleted User]

stator wrote: »

I miss the likes of Play.com, TheHut and ChoicesDirect, offering real competitive prices.

Those firms took advantage of Jersey tax loopholes.
Those loopholes have been closed for a few years now..

LadyDee

Our town centre has recently been rebuilt and redeveloped at the cost of millions and millions of pounds, not to mention several years of complete chaos and disruption for local residents. All the small shops that we had have been forced out due to the massive rise in business rates (a small unit was £10,000 p.a. how risen to £50,000), they've shut all the charity shops (ignoring the fact that they actually attracted a lot of people to the old town centre). It's all coffee shops now, one M&S which has more staff than customers, one Fenwicks - likewise. The only shop that is full of customers is Primark. Quite a few shops that really only do well as Christmas. Already (after one year) a couple of units have closed. Got rid of the old market and replaced it with fancy booths selling olives and artisan bread.

It's very difficult to support high street shopping when there are few high street stores.

Malthusian

Thrugelmir wrote: »

Amazon won't be interested in anything that doesn't sell in volume.

Completely the opposite in my experience. Throughout my music buying life I could only find what I wanted on Amazon. There was no point hunting through HMV for the symphonic metal or Asian music sections. HMV was the shop where you only went if you wanted what everyone else wanted, Amazon was where you went if you wanted something else. A classic example of the long tail.

With Spotify et al the "pile it high and sell it expensive" strategy of the big record labels is ever more difficult. People aren't as willing to rush down to a record shop and by a bland boyband ballad which will be instantly forgotten, when they can get the same two days' enjoyment by listening to it on Spotify for free.