New owner of Jessops in an interview today with ITN news announced some stores will reopen. He said some new ideas are being introduced such as matching in store prices with Net prices. There will also be a 'collect at store' after making the order on the Net. It was not clear how many old stores will re open. Although I have been critical of Jessops for being just box movers, I welcome this news as our hobby needs this outlet.

Pete

40 stores are to be re-opened, including Aberdeen in Scotland (no mention of Edinburgh, where they had two, and could surely still operate with one). Jones has cut the administrative head office expenditure from £8m a year to £1.5m target, and believes that for items like cameras, people prefer to collect and don't trust deliveries.

David

I'm surprised that Scotlands two major cities, Glasgow and Edingurgh have not been mentioned, well so far.

Oxford Street in London will be my only Jessops access which I can get to easily by underground from where I live. Having several stores in Oxford Street is probably for the tourist trade first and formost.

Pete

They had "Collect in store" when I bought my a580 from them 2 years ago. (Two years on Sunday, at that).

A novel idea to introduce would be to employ people who know how the equipment they sell actually works, although to be fair, they weren't as bad as Photo-Optix. (Anyone remember them?) The salesman there who sold me my KM 7D told me that making any changes to menu functions had to be done by a firmware update.....

Here's hoping for a store in Glasgow, Bigger than the Buchanan Galleries one, but smaller than the Sauchiehall Street branch.

I'd much prefer actually handling a camera and would pay a premium (say £10 more) to buy from a shop where I could have a hands-on, touchy-feely of the new camera/lens first.

Unfortunately Jessops never had any decent Sony stock to try out, only entry models yet had some mid-top range Canon and Nikon. I bought my KM7D and a Sony A100 from Jessops in Kendal.
The Wilkinson shop in Kendal had a much better selection and I have bought several items from them.
The Aberdeen Jessops was a waste of space, poorly situated out of the main shopping areas. They had nothing worth buying Sony wise.

Recently most of my purchases have come via on-line shopping but I'm not as comfortable with that.

As my dad would say "during the war....", all my MD equipment without exception was bought over the counter from a SHOP. Nothing mail order.

Mike

I'm glad that some of the stores are re-opening. There are definite advantages to bricks and mortar stores. I bought both my A100 and A700 from Jessops' branches. I try and use real stores when I can as I don't want to have to rely on internet stores and YouTube review videos . As Mike and others have said; there are some things that really benefit from getting your hands on something.

This week I wanted to buy a small camera bag for my Nex kit. I wanted a bag as small as possible, but big enough for what I wanted to carry. Easy enough to get an idea of what might be ok online, but not the same as being able to try the real thing. I drove the 30+ miles to Morris Photographic in Chipping Norton (Oxfordshire) and the staff there were patient enough to let me try half a dozen bags to find the optimum one. (I took the large items, camera and lenses, with me and tried them for size.) Sure, the thought of returning home and buying the bag over the internet crossed my mind, but I didn't. I decided that the service was worth the extra I might be paying. (As it turned out Morris have this bag cheaper than any one else in the UK anyway . ) Morris are not a proper high street store, they are located in a small industrial estate, and I think they do the majority of their business online, but they do have a shop front.

I guess that, if we want the advantages of seeing and holding something in person, we need to support these dwindling oases of photographic retail.