Retailers on the whole need to think about what their stores actually are. At the moment, most stores on the High Street are simply showrooms for Amazon.

I'm a firm believer that people make purchasing decisions based on emotion. They don't care about features and benefits, they (largely) don't care about practicalities - they just care about how good it looks, how nice it is to use and how they "feel" about it. Yes, there are exceptions, but I don't believe that people make impulsive decisions based on a specs sheet.

That's why, in my experience, Apple Stores are always rammed. In an Apple store, you're not given the 'hard sell'. You are simply invited into the store and allowed to 'play' with the product and learn about the product. That's how you win customers around - not by bombarding them by tech specs and warranties - just by inviting them in to get a sense of what it is like to use, touch and own the product. Who cares if you can buy a better spec laptop for half the price, or get double the warranty next door in John Lewis? It is all about giving buyers that feeling of owning it before they've handed over their cash.

And that's where other retailers are failing. If you are interested in specs and features and benefits, why would you go to a store? That information is very easy to find elsewhere and, in the main, much more trustworthy from the keyword of a ?stranger than it is from the mouth of a salesperson. Retailers need to make their stores fun, enjoyable and emotional places to be - not places to be sold to. Locking everything behind glass and asking disinterested and ill-informed staff to stack boxes as high as possible isn't the way to do that.

There used to be four camera shops in Chester. A Jessops and three others. Jessops bought one of the other three out but then closed the shop when they nearly went bust a few years ago.

The staff in the remaining Jessops shop were generally OK and reasonably knowledgeable and I bought stuff from them in the past but I also buy online and have even bought from Jessops online as occasionally they were actually the cheapest. My on-line purchases tend to be lenses and accessories not cameras.

My first digital camera was bought from the shop Jessops took over and when I bought a DSLR in 2011 that was purchased from one of the other camera shops in Chester which is part of the London Camera Exchange group.

I was expecting to pay through the nose for the camera which hadn't been out that long and was actually pretty scarce in the shops and on-line. I nearly fell over when I asked the price. It was £180 [icheaper[/i than anywhere I could find online and cheaper than the price the same shop quoted me on the phone a few days before.

So it doesn't always follow on-line is best for prices and I got to check the camera out properly before I bought it. The shop even threw in 100 free prints.

I would envision street retail becoming more orientated around the manufacturer, as a demo centre. Like the Apple centres, it's a nice place to be, to touch and feel and try stuff out. Apply don't care if you then go home and buy their kit on-line, because you're still buying their stuff. PC World can't do that, but HP can. Porsche and Mercedes are making similar moves in their car dealerships, each with a demo centre where you can try a greater variety of options and test driving, and it doesn't matter to them if you then go buy the car from a dealership or from the internet.
I expect we will start seeing more along those lines, shops aligned to a particular manufacturer, that are more of a demo centre. Whether a Levi's store or Sony or Porsche or whatever.

It is certainly the way things would logically move for the higher end items, I'm not sure it would work for lots of mass market items like shoes and clothes. Supermarkets do some of those lines but I'm not sure I wanna buy my shoes from the same place I buy my bog roll, I may not have that choice however.

Yes....having thought about it a bit further....the "demo centre" works for high end items, but not low end.
Low end will be piled high and sold cheap, because that's it's differentiator. In the example of shoes, Brantano gets ahead because it's piled up self serve, as are the sports shops that have overtaken JJB in trainer sales.

I agree that the model wouldn't work on 'consumables' but not sure I agree on clothing.

I'd say that a lot more fashion retailers are shifting to a model of "come in and experience" rather than "come in and be sold to". The new Topshop/Man opened in Leeds just before Christmas and it's a world away from the previous store. Much more room to move, staff with iPads helping customers, personal shopping services and a much more pleasant environment - I certainly don't think that they're unique in that regard and Topshop is hardly "high-end". It's not Primark, but it's hardly Harvey Nichols.

I agree that we might see more 'manufacturer' stores in the coming years but I'm not convinced that Curry's couldn't follow a similar model to Apple for example. If Curry's can show customers that their product can do something clever or eye-catching (regardless of how special it actually is), then they'll get the attention of a lot of people - and some of those will open their wallets.

And on a similar line - how the hell did TK Maxx find their business model and make it work ?

1. Pile all of your stock out onto the shop floor and cram in as many racks as you can, each one stuffed tight with stock.
2. Make your showroom look like a badly organised church hall jumble sale.
3. Sell everything at the highest price you can think of and use the "its a designer name" as an excuse.

I prefer charity shops, at least everyone knows you're a cheapskate and if you're going to have to fight for something in your size its better to have to fight a pensioner for it.

Talking of John Lewis / Waitrose it has been doing well - sales of £9.5B against M&S ((a former world giant of retailing)'s £10B. I am concerned though that the CEO of Jonelle was making noises about opening lots of new stores. To me that could kill a good business - at present Jonelle do well because they occupy the key site in most large shopping centres and people are will ing to travel to them. Likewise Waitrose have a rarity value and concentrate on affluent areas. Why saddle yourself with the major overhead of new shops when current policy works?

Somerfield doing that (when they bought Kwiksave in 199icon_cool.gif really accelerated their downfall.

I think that was different. Operating at the lower end of the market they needed a bigger market share and critical mass to hope to compete with Tesco and Sainsbury. Waitrose are somewhat different in that they have a different unique niche - upper part of the market. M&S Food is probably their main competitor but only over part of their range.

Waitrose play the system from both ends though - they promote themselves as a higher class of food retailler, use quality displays etc, but then spend a lot of money on their shelf tickets telling you how in a price comparison certain products were cheaper than the major supermarkets that they pretend they aren't cometing against.

Mmm, that really was a big bite to take when they were already having trouble competing with Tesco and ASDA, I thought it was biting off more than they could chew that did them in, that and Kwiksave being a bit of a financial black hole.

I always found Somerfield to have lost their way, they didn't want to be an "Express" type store but they were too small and didn't have the estate to fight it out with the big boys, CO-OP have proved that the sites and store size works as long as you concentrate on the service and have the stock to sell, trying to match the big boys on price will get you nowhere very fast.

Back in 1998, Somerfield's view was that the stores were in similar locations and of similar size. Clearly they were very wrong in terms of location. Their business model didn't seem right anyway, being neither cheap nor quality.

Hey as long as they pay my bill to do the comparison work they can do what they want

Waitrose are very good at higher end niche products, the bio organic yoghurt and Icelandic mineral water type stuff, they do it well too.

Depends on what scale I suppose. There are a lot of affluent areas without a JL (Leeds and York being two areas that JL have publically claimed they're targeting). The York store will be based on the development that will, amongst other things, be home to the new York Community Stadium whilst Leeds is something of a 'pie in the sky' development of Eastgate that, IMO, probably won't happen for some time yet.