Consumer electronics retail hell

Olympusverve
Shopping with Mrs Tosh for a new digital camera over the weekend was a reminder of just how dreadful offline gadget hunting is.

The requirement was a digital camera for less than £100, and around 3 megapixels or better. Look online, and the task seems pretty simple. In bricks ‘n’ mortar world, it’s quite hard.

John Lewis seemed uninterested in selling something for less than £200.

Dixons - surely a definition of hell, with some strident beep echoing round the store every ten seconds and a weary collection of merchandise - was utterly useless (Can anyone tell me how, exactly, Dixons prospers? Parent company DSG International announces
interim results on January 18, and I’ll be very interested to see if
- in today’s testing high street environment - they show any signs of suffering from the dire, dire shopping experience they offer).

Then we came to Jessops, the photographic specialist I’ve written about before (the comments under that post are very interesting reading indeed). Last May, I wrote that the store chain relied on digital camera sales for 45% of sales. The latest results (Word file) now show that figure at a staggering 88.7%.

Why, then, at least in its Canary Wharf branch, are the compact digital cameras relegated to two small cabinets, in a tiny, distant, cramped corner of the store? Camera bags, telescopes and various other relatively obscure stuff gets a far better show. Digital SLRs, sales of which are surging and which you might expect would dominate a specialist store like this, occupy only a neighbouring, low-profile cabinet. A mystery, really.

Still, at least they had some cameras inside the price range. And - the irony - in the end Mrs Tosh picked a more expensive camera, the lovely pink Olympus Stylus Verve model above. The modest range, which at least hit all the price points even if it was well-hidden, led to a sale, and at a price comparable to online retailers.

But all around the place, a warning. Going home we passed mobile phone shops; colourful, carefully designed and packed with shoppers. Marvel at their merchandising, then remember that Samsung and LG alone will ship 175m camera phones this year. They’re only the third and fourth biggest mobile manufacturers.

Jessops sell mobiles too. Difference is, mobile phone companies know their devices are not just gadgets, but fashion accessories, and they sell them in high-tech boutiques where customers can poke, test and feel the gadgets. It’s a million miles from Jessops nerdy shops, where the fun is locked in behind glass.

If the geeks are researching and buying their SLRs online, and everyone else starts looking to mobile phones, who will Jessops be selling to in a few years’ time?