Fopp Music Stores in Administration

[ikonia]

Fopp Music stores, one of my more enjoyable places to shop has gone into administration.

not sure if this effects anyone or how big fopp was across the UK.

big dissapointment to me personally.

[Steve B]

i found out about this the other night too. i was gutted, girlfriend couldn't believe it.
Its one of my favourite record stores. I love(d) it how they wouldn't price any of their stuff at .99p and stupid penny prices like that, everything was always to the pound.

[Tarffie]

This has been posted before but I can't see the thread...

Edit: Oh it was in Fiesty, fair enough. I'm not surprised they're closing down given their odd choice of shop location, plus I don't think I know anyone that had heard of them until they closed. Buying Music Zone was always a dodgy move.

[Kezzer]

i found out about this the other night too. i was gutted, girlfriend couldn't believe it.
Its one of my favourite record stores. I love(d) it how they wouldn't price any of their stuff at .99p and stupid penny prices like that, everything was always to the pound.

But if you buy 100 of them then you've saved yourself a whole pound!

[Funkstar]

Over a hundred stores nation wide apparently.

I've never felt so bad about a shop closing. They were the UK's largest independent record store. I just hope something can be salvaged from it.

[chicken]

But if you buy 100 of them then you've saved yourself a whole pound!

If you buy 100 of them, you've saved yourself a great record store

[digit]

I quite liked fopp the few times I have been in there branch in reading. Trouble was bar one or two people I have spoken to they hadn't heard of them.. They had some really good prices on many cd's and dvd's often matching or beating online retailers on price! They did have some rather retro point of sale methods that I felt were a bit out of date with how HMV and the like display goods?

[Aaron]

I hope they pull through administration. I always bought my CDs from Fopp whenever I could. Their Tottenham Court Road branch is just awesome.

[Whiternoise]

Noooo..

[Saracen]

i found out about this the other night too. i was gutted, girlfriend couldn't believe it.
Its one of my favourite record stores. I love(d) it how they wouldn't price any of their stuff at .99p and stupid penny prices like that, everything was always to the pound.

I agree about the x.99p pricing being stupid, BUT ..... a lot of the buying public are stupid.

A friend of mine runs a small group of hifi stores. A few years back, he decided that pricing something at £149.99, or £399.99 (etc) was patronising, and rounded the prices in one store up to whole pounds. Personally, I don't much care if I'm paying £399.99 or £400 for whatever it is I'm buying, let alone £1999.99 as opposed to £2000? Who does?

But to his astonishment, two things happened.

1) Sales dropped by about 20%

2) Several people complained to the manager of another store, about 30 miles away that they'd come there because the other store (the one with the rounded up prices) was "expensive".

Yup, people would drive 30 miles to the 'cheaper' store.

So, he started pricing at £x.99 again in the test store, and sales went back to their previous level. Go figure.


My conclusions are :-

1). With the 99p thing, it isn't about what something costs, but about perceptions. £399.99 is three hundred and something, while £400 is four hundred. It's perceived as more expensive, even if the reality is that the difference is trivial, and the same people that perceive that as expensive wouldn't bother to bend down to pick up a penny if they saw it laying in the road..

2) Big stores, like Tesco, M&S, etc don't do anything without good reason. So if they always (or nearly always) price in .99p, it's because that's what works, and can be demonstrated to work. A direct implication of that is that a significant proportion of the buying public are stupid, and that the rest get wound up by this daft .99 pricing ... especially on expensive items costing hundreds, or thousands.

[capt_cornflake]

Please tell me it's not true!
I usually pop into the one in Solihull most friday afternoons on the way home from work.
What am I going to do with my friday afternoons now?

[Fatboy40]

And the worst thing is that staff may not be payed their months wages as there's no cash !.

[ikonia]

I'm in two minds on the staff.

1.) gutted that they are not getting wages, I normally enjoyed the staff who worked in the 2 fopp shops near me.
2.) guttet that they knew there was something coming and asked to stop selling vouchers and the like until it was cleared up, the managment told them to not stop selling so they did carry on, but this act has left many punter out of pocket too - so perhaps a slight moral high ground on that - they knew administration was coming and asked stop selling - yet carried on regardless when told to do so.

[bigblue]

1). With the 99p thing, it isn't about what something costs, but about perceptions. £399.99 is three hundred and something, while £400 is four hundred. It's perceived as more expensive, even if the reality is that the difference is trivial, and the same people that perceive that as expensive wouldn't bother to bend down to pick up a penny if they saw it laying in the road..

2) Big stores, like Tesco, M&S, etc don't do anything without good reason. So if they always (or nearly always) price in .99p, it's because that's what works, and can be demonstrated to work. A direct implication of that is that a significant proportion of the buying public are stupid, and that the rest get wound up by this daft .99 pricing ... especially on expensive items costing hundreds, or thousands.

Spot on. Annoyed you beat me to it

If you round up a little it hurts, as you're moving your prices into the next pound or ten, hundred or even thousand. If you round down a little no-one notices, as you're still in the same pound bracket.

I worked for a company that tried going to .95 instead of .99 to see if it made any difference to sales. Quantity of sales stayed exactly the same, but the company as a whole lost about 15k a week from the 4p reduction on every item sold, as well as all the labour costs repricing everything.

The big boys know what they're doing, and as much as I loved Fopp and it's quirkiness, quirkiness is rarely profitable.

[Agent]

Gutting
Really liked Fopp. Also had a lot of CD's that were hard to find in the bigger establishments.

I remember wanting a specific Cream album a while back. Went to all the usual places and they didn't have it. HMV offered to order it in though for £20.
Went to Fopp and there it was, at a fiver!

Have they already closed their doors, or is there a chance to get a last second bargain?

[BUFF]

Read an article in The Sunday Times yesterday on how Rough Trade were planning to setup a shop along the Fopp formula. I'm guessing that the article was researched/written before Fopp announced that they were going into administration.
As a Glasgwegian I can remember the original Fopp market stall so it's a bit sad but the takeover of Music Zone does look to perhaps have been 1 step too far ...