I searched and didnt see any mention of this, its pretty huge news here anyway, they are in admin and refusing to accept gift vouchers. Here it's not legal to do this if your company is only in admin stage, but I dont think they are accepting them here either.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-01-16-angry-grandfather-walks-out-of-hmv-with-3-games-after-staff-refuse-to-accept-gift-voucher?utm_source=eurogamer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=net-daily

The sickening thing is they knew BEFORE xmas that they would not redeem the vouchers, but still let people purchase them.

[i]
HMV is facing growing anger over its decision to refuse gift vouchers, and many customers believe the company should have stopped selling them in early December after warning investors of the coming crisis. Yesterday police were called to a HMV store in Oxford to sort out a dispute sparked when staff refused to accept vouchers from two customers. Finance director Ian Kenyonn said the company was confident of its legal position, having checked with lawyers back in December. "We had a reasonable expectation [in the runup to Christmas]
of addressing our issues with the banks," he said.[/i]

It's all because of those pesky digital sales.

But seriously, it's a shame so many shops are failing, and thousands of people have lost their jobs.

HMV (Japan) is still doing well enough for itself, both with retail stores and their online store.

This is really serious, people have all the rights to be angry for this...

I see no reason why gift cards should be honoured, since they are in admin.

Really if you buy gift cards look at the company you are buying from since people knew that HMV was weak when they bought the gift cards it is their own fault

yeah, giftcards aren't like coupons they are a purchase. Its like them canceling preorders and keeping the money.

So basically either way I(not me, hypothetical i) paid for a game before christmas and go to pick it up today and they refuse to honor it or refund it.

There was a news article about an hour ago that Blockbuster has also gone into Administration.

at least they're taking their giftcards

It actually surprises me more that Blockbuster are taking gift cards than that HMV aren't. Once you go into administration then you are required to pay out to your creditors in a particular way, and it's unusual for a gift card to be considered an important creditor. Given that HMV went into admin because they broke covenants on their loans, it's reasonable to assume those loans were made with preferential status, and those lenders would have insisted they are repaid before anyone else.

Instead of going on about whether or not it's ethical of them not to pay out gift cards, maybe people should start to question the laws that put the big corporations ahead of "regular" people.

If politicians weren't this corrupt, they'd exclude gift cards from the big "creditor" pile because it's ridiculous to make them creditors in the first place. Just fucking give people their stuff which they paid for instead of letting all the money go to the banks first. Everyone knows no-one with a gift card will see a penny and if these gift cards were sold mere weeks ago, it's a really dirty blow to make them invalid.

Fuck the law, people need to stop bending over and getting reamed left and right with all the money always going into the deep pockets of the filthy rich while the "common" people are scraping to get by and yet have to pay through their nose to save the huge banks and corporations from bankruptcy while CEO's get drowned in bonuses and wages.

In the end, corporations have become great at treating us badly at best - we're pushed around like sheep, barely even get decent support for the stuff we buy and if anything goes wrong, we have to deal with some idiot 50.000 miles away who can barely speak your language and reads off a piece of paper because he's too thick to memorize it.

And yet, despite many corporations now going bankrupt (often because customers no longer respect them and stop going there due to poor business practices), other similar corporations don't pay attention and just keep on making the same mistakes ... . That goes for publishers like Ubisoft as well - good thing we have CD Projekt and a few other examples that are well off without screwing with their customers.

I get where you're coming from, but I think you're painting it a little too black and white. I don't think it's quite that anyone has specifically lined up the gift card holders. It's simply that those that can lend more, can negotiate better deals. As a company wanting to borrow HMV's board were (near required / strongly encouraged) to seek the best terms. It's pretty standard that you'll get better terms if you give the lender better preference on repayment. That's just reducing risk for the lender, thus reducing the cost of the loan.

So I don't think there is so much a capitalist scheme to screw the consumer, so much as there is a bi-product of our markets (and potentially capitalism) that in order to acquire the funds cheap, you need to sell out your customer base. There's absolutely no reason to believe that GOG or CDPR haven't done this. Perhaps if GOG went bust then we'd discover all gift codes void through the same mechanism. Simply that they sold our gift codes / vouchers credit worthiness in order to get the big loan they wanted. Once sold, it's not theirs to honor.

How would you change that so that it "worked"?

My own take on the gift vouchers is that, the company hopes to be sold as a "going concern", if they dont honour the vouchers, they needn't bother trading on the high street again as people will never shop there again.

They knew they were going to screw the customer base, because they said the checked with their legal advisors before christmas, on whether they would have to honour the vouchers, apparently they were told "no", so quite smugly, they are refusing, saying they already checked the legality...yet still allowed the vouchers to be sold.

I would never set foot in one of their shops after seeing their attitude on this and I had planned on monday to go and buy DMC, but once the story broke, I just bought it in Tescos instead.

Considering how cheap DVDs are now and hot fast they hit retail (back in the VHS days it could take a year to two years before a film came out for retail sale - so there was a big market for rentals - and they cost a lot more - for the same price as one or two VHS you can now get a whole season of many TV shows) I was suprised that Blockbuster lasted as long as it has! I thought they would have been one of the first to have to redesign or go under a lot longer ago (even in the pre-recession days).


Sadly I think the recession is showing that big business can't compete on the highstreet with supermarkets and online shops - coupled to the problem that small scale shops also can't easily compete either.

Yeah, look at the deals on Amazon for DVD's, then take in to consideration Netflix and Lovefilm for streaming movies. Then we also have Sky on Demand movies and the Virgin equivalent, must be hard for them.

A few year back our government was saying the recession was over, doesn't look like it unfortunately :(

I think the problem is that the nature if business has changed. A big problem with that is that the rates tax and costs of running any shop these days is so high. You can lose so much money just pouring it into local and national tax and other sources before you've taken out your wages and profit from the shop. It makes highstreet shops very unprofitable for both small and large scale companies.

It also means you can't price compete with the online retailers very well - which means more highstreet shops are forced to reduce their stock and once they have to "order things in" people quickly go home to order it to their own front door from their computer.


That said going around in Christmas the temperature many shops were setting their stores to was insane. If you had a coat and trousers on you'd be fast wanting to leave within a few moments of entering and the staff were in full summer wear! A big area for potential savings there (warm yes, but you don't need it at mid summer heat wave temperatures).