Carphone Warehouse, Dixons return from honeymoon with injured numbers

An article about Dixons

I wonder what the comments are going to be like.

They don't seem to know what a Subject Access Request is

I've just submitted a complaint to the ICO because they failed to respond to my SAR within 40 days. So here we have a new company that doesn't seem to understand their basic data protection obligations. I'm going to do a data audit on this company over the next few weeks.

www.mindmydata.co.uk

I'm not at all surprised...

Mother rhydian needed a new mobile the other week (and I needed a SIM only contract). So we steeled ourselves for a trip in to town on a school holiday saturday so she could gauge the look and feel of a few handsets, and decide on the one she wanted.

First stop was Tesco (she's a tesco mobile customer and didn't want to change networks). The "shop" was a dark, pokey corner of the electricals department. No Moto Gs in stock.

Next stop was Carphone Warehouse. The store was a part of a shopping centre so a decent size and very attractive. The problem was that during this very busy day they only had two people working (one on a "desk", the other at the till). We waited patiently for 10-15 minutes for the guy at the till to finish trying to sell someone a new phone and contract. He made no effort to acknowledge us at all. In the end we simply walked out, as did 4 or 5 other people in that 15 minutes.

In the end, in desperation, we tried the EE shop opposite. Its was packed, but they had at least 3 staff on (possibly four) and had a wide range of phones on offer (including both the Moto G and Galaxy S4 mini that we wanted to try). Unfortunately EE doesn't cover mother rhydian's home and they didn't offer us a signal box.

Therefore seeing Carphone Warehouse's revenues falling is no surprise to anyone who's actually tried to buy from them recently...

Obviously living under a rock...

I'm just back from Mars, so I missed this merger!

... But that's unfortunately the last time I buy anything from CPW then. They weren't ever brilliant, and they're a rubbish ISP, but phones came unlocked and they had relatively good deals / CS.

DSG on the other hand... well.. Good luck to all the employees & customers.

It's a shame that we only have one monolithic electronics company on the high street now - more so that it's one I don't ever want to buy from again.

Crap Retail Directive #196156

Can we please make it obligatory to refer to the new entity as "Dixphone Whorehouse"?

Hardly surprising since their online offering is bonkers too

Mrs Cynic wanted a Asus T100 Transformer Tablet with Windows (I know, I know) so looked online for best prices.

32gb model at PC World came in cheapest (£229 online vs £249 in store) yet for some bizarre reason you could only 'reserve and collect' for collection and payment at some stores. For other stores you could only purchase online for instore collection!!

It can't be a space issue as I live roughly halfway between 2 stores and the much much larger store was the one that didn't offer 'reserve and collect'.

Mind you it didn't get any better in store, the muppets had picked the Android version when I went to collect it!!

And they wonder why their physical stores are dying on their arses!!

As an aside the T100 is actually a useful bit of kit for what my wife wants and it has expandable memory unlike a certain fruit based kit provider.