News - DSGi adds to retail gloom with announcement of £30 million loss

[GaryRW]

... if you use PC Worlds preorder web pages you can actually get prices that are as good if not better than most places online.

I've done that quite a few times. Bought my printer, monitor, few other bits and pieces from them. It is nice to have the comfort of knowing you can return something without having to worry about costs of post & packing to return it etc....

Still have to be careful though as they're usually still more expensive on most stuff (particularly if you can get free P&P from a well known online retailers due to use of these forums....) but PC world often has internet offers that bring the price down to what it should be.

Worked out well the other week when I tried to buy some creative speakers from them (T20's). They had a high pitched whine coming from the left speaker, and I could take them straight back. To be fair to PC world, they let me try a second pair and when they had the same problem, there was no argument and gave me the money back - they didn't even want to listen to them and took my word that both sets were faulty.

I have no doubt that they rip most of their customers off, but I for one wouldn't want them to disappear.

[Jay]

I think PCWB have very good offers for low end desktop PCs etc. I got some IBM ThinkCenters with XP Pro for about £250 each.

[Sinizter]

I wouldn't miss them if they went down. Staff at PC World are so ignorant about computer products that its just unbelievable ...

As for Currys -> You need to refill the gas in plasma TVs every 3 years, so you should buy LCD. Right on the bleeding edge of technical knowledge.

As for their business arm, it took them 5 tries to get a network printer working at all at a site, and then I still had to sort it out afterwards.

[s1lkw0rm]

I would'nt be suprised if they were to dissapear.

They charge extortioanate prices and the advice given from there employees are usually incorrect. If only they could retrain there staff and make there prices more competitive.

[Behemoth]

I wouldn't miss them if they went down. Staff at PC World are so ignorant about computer products that its just unbelievable ...

As for Currys -> You need to refill the gas in plasma TVs every 3 years, so you should buy LCD. Right on the bleeding edge of technical knowledge.

As for their business arm, it took them 5 tries to get a network printer working at all at a site, and then I still had to sort it out afterwards.

Hell on earth mate, you must have had a really dumb sales person when you went into that store. Everyone in the Curry's store I work at in Truro, in Cornwall knows that a Plasma TV can't be re-gassed.

Annoyingly yes, its not the managers that suffer in all of this, but it's us, the minions, the people that do all the hard work, and for what ? Just over minimum wage. Two years ago they took comission away from us, for those of us that were big hitters/money takers in the store that was a good £300 a month less off our basic.

The training structure in there is after you've had your induction, your own your own, it's down to you to do the training, in your own time. With no time given to us in works time none of this training gets done.


It's not really any enjoyable job anymore, it's become a battlefield, not so much with the management but with customers in general. You'll always hear about the bad storries of retail stores before you hear about the good.

Sorry I could go on and on just makes me angry because of a few bad sales people in the company that we are all tarred with the same brush.

[Spud1]

I hope they stick around...i'm pretty confident that they will anyway but shall see.

I seem to be in the minority here, but imho PCW/Currys have both improved immensely in the past 3 years, and are now actually competitive on the vast majority of their product lines. Sure they majority of the staff are still clueless, and you would still be mad to buy certain products from them (pre-built PCs for example), but they have plenty of good deals and always seem to have a decent sale of some kind. I am speaking about their consumer side here - my experiences with PCW Business have not been the best, and they are definitely not competitive in the same way the consumer arm has become.

Thinking recently, i've bought my leather chair, numerous video games, our current router + wlan cards, a graphics card, some usb sticks, 46"TV, misc cables, Xbox VGA adapater..all that in the past 12 months. Every single item there was cheaper in currys or PCW than anywhere else (online or otherwise), and most of them were "standard" items (ie not sale items).

I'd put their losses partly down to the price drops in the past few years that have let them become a little more competitive..sadly it didn't help them much and seems to have just resulted in losing lots of money

[HarryOatcake]

They cannot close quickly enough for me
PC World is the absolute Pits, aftersales support forget it they don't want to know,
new customer sales, Yes Sir, No Sir, cannot do enough
afterwards you are left out to hang out and dry for all they care.

Once Bitten.

Harry.