Discount shopping in eastern-bloc style surroundings! (Argos)

Member Name: worst_trip

Product:	Argos
Date:	19/09/09 (48 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Sells a huge and excellent range of reasonably-priced goods for the home and garden

Disadvantages: A great deal of queueing is involved when you come to make a purchase

For almost any conceivable personal, home or garden product 'Argos' the catalogue shop has to be your one-stop shop. So extensive is their range of stock that it's almost become a case of, if Argos doesn't sell some version of what you're after, a person might want to think twice about whether they really think they need to buy whatever the item is in the first place....and Argos sells at rock-bottom prices, too.

There are Argos branches everywhere now - most town and out-of-town retail centres have one. There are different types of shop - Argos 'Extra', which sells a somewhat reduced range of 'most popular' type products, as well as the regular discount-shopping warehouse style original shops that stock - well, basically everything under the sun.

Argos' bid for high-street retail domination has led to their catalogue getting bigger and bigger and bigger. In the shops when you go in to pick up your catalogue, they now provide you with a fairly heavy-duty looking (though in practice, quite flimsy) little 'long-life' type plastic bag to carry it away in. In the latest version of the catalogue, which is nearing the thickness of a phone book, newer lines I've noted include a fairly extensive range of camping gear, Argos travel insurance (of all things!) and products for family pets - including a small selection of tropical aquaria. The new kitchen and cookware ranges are also well worth a nose through - most of the celebrity chefs you see on TV have brought out a range of some sort of that's stocked by Argos, and it's diverting to compare and contrast the prices, as these clearly seem to be ranged by Michelin-star worthiness or chef status some such - so that the Marco Pierre White range of slightly tackily black-versus-red painted gadgets, for example, sells for the most money, whereas at more of a shall we say lower end price bracket you'll find kitchenware endorsed by say, Anthony Worrall-Thomson, or that slightly annoying Irish bird who invariably pops up on BBC 1 on a Saturday morning, showing you how to bake stuff.

Gawking at what other people might want to fill their houses with is always fun with the 'giftware' section of the Argos catalogue; and here and there throughout its pages are featured some really way-out things that you can buy. Although the 'Elizabeth Duke' jewellrey selection has really smartened up its act over the last 10 years or so, in the 9-carat gold section, you can still find the odd item that MUST have been included for its entertainment value alone.

Actually getting hold of stock from an actual Argos outlet is where the whole catalogue shopping experience falls down, in my opinion. It is fortunate indeed that Argos sells such an extensive range of sometimes quite desirable stuff at such very competitive prices, for if it didn't there's no way anyone would ever select to go there out of choice. As a young child - this was well before the fall of Eastern-bloc communism - I was taken on a visit to the former USSR. Going to the shops there was a bit different for tourists than it was for local people of course, but we saw them having to queue and queue and queue, first to make their selection of goods, and then waiting and waiting again to pay for their purchases. And in many ways it's just like that at Argos - once you've waited and waited to pay for your purchase - and the shops are invariably well under-staffed - you get a ticket with a number on it and then have to wait and wait some more in a long and painfully drawn-out procedure, while someone searches the warehouse high and low to find whatever it was you've bought. On a communal TV screen in the collection area, they give estimates of how long it'll take for each order number to arrive, but the timings I find are always under-estimates. Eventually though, someone will bring your item(s) to the front-of-house area for collection. In the interim, more customers waiting for their purchases to come from the warehouse will have joined you, and they'll all jostle and elbow and do their damndest, even if whatever they've bought isn't even due to arrive at the collection area for another seven minutes, to get ahead of you in the 'queue'. It's not so much queuing that goes on at Argos as a free-for-all however: a lot like fighting for prime position at a church jumble-sale. As everything you might purchase at Argos comes sight-unseen, you also have the option of requesting a look at your item before you pay for it. In this case you have to do the double-queueing rigmarole (first at the tills, then at the collection area) but might still, if you decide you don't like the look of the prospective purchase, walk away empty-handed - which is always a bit frustrating.

A lot of the shops now have an automated do-it-yourself purchase till, where you can reserve items from the warehouse and pay for them by card without waiting for a customer assistant to be free. This works very well when it.....works, but in practice I've found these automatic machines are not always in working order in the shops.

All the queueing and jostling is always an unpleasant experience, but unfortunately it seems to be all part of shopping at Argos: you get bargain deals but there is something of a personal price to pay. The other main drawback I've found - and this may relate directly to the increasing amount of stock Argos sells - is that quite often these days, I've found the items I want to buy are out of stock when I get to the shop. Fortunately Argos has a very good, customer-friendly website, which incorporates a stock-checker function for stores in your local area (you can select shops nearby by town name and / or nearest branches by postcode). You can reserve purchases online for free, to ensure that they will be available by the time you get to a branch - the stock is usually held in reserve for you for the next 48 hours, or till the next day at least. I have used this function several times and it works very well.

Remembering the days before there was such a thing as 'Argos' I'm very glad on balance that it's now an integral part of the British high street.

Summary: Catalogue shopping recommended for those willing to take on the complex purchasing arragements