V.Shop (Our Price)

Member Name: Dr_Evil

Product:	Our Price
Date:	16/11/00 (179 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: The listening posts

Disadvantages: The prices

You may or may not have noticed but recently Virgin have been rebranding all of their Our Price stores as V.Shops. The new chain supposedly concentrates on 'new technology' although if you go into any of their stores they still sell mainly CD's and videos as before.

In addition to the CD's and videos V.Shop stocks a large range of DVD's as well as 'Virgin Mobile' Phones, MP3 players, Minidisc players and other new technology. Each store also has a number of PC's which allow you to browse the Virgin catalogue and possibly the Internet (but don't quote me on that one as I didn't actually try it).

One of the strange things about V.Shop is the pricing. Unusually all prices are rounded to a whole pound, therefore CDs are £14 rather than £13.99 and so on. Why they have decided to do this is beyond me as I thought the whole idea of knocking the penny off was to make the items sound cheaper! Whether or not this makes sense it still doesn't hide the fact that there CD's etc are massively overpriced. I can't remember the last time I bought a full price CD from a shop as you can normally pick up new releases for £9.99 or less at on-line stores such as Amazon.co.uk, and if you look at Virgin.net at the moment you can pick up a CD from their Top 50 for just £5!!!

The multibuy offers at V.Shop seem worse that usual too. CDs are 2 for £25 whereas from HMV they are usually only 2 for £22, and DVD's are buy one get one half price which doesn't seem bad except virtually all the DVD's are priced at £20 or £25 and even the Warner Brothers titles with an RRP of £12.99 are sold for £13.

The only thing that actually impressed me about V.Shop is the listening posts which are by far the best I have seen. At most shops you get a choice of about 6 CDs at each listening post and the headphones are usually broken anyway. At V.Shop however, you can listen to any CD in their catalogue (or at least
everyone I tried). You can either scan the barcode of the CD at the post or use a search engine to find the artist and title you want and the CD is loaded instantly and you can listen to any track you like. The listening post has all the standard CD player features so you can fast forward through tracks etc all using a touchscreen. This really is excellent as I usually find if I am interested in an older album it isn't possible to listen to it first.

Good as the listening posts are however, the prices at V.Shop means I am unlikely ever to use it as anything other than to sample CDs before buying them over the Internet.

Summary: