HMV steps into the future

The first of the new-look HMVs has opened in Merry Hill, and The Guardian has been down for a look.

Curiously, Simon Fox, who has overseen the flipcharts and market surveys which has led up to this moment, used to be in charge of Comet, and he's brought with him everything he learned making shopping there such a dispirting experience - genuinely, who can tell the difference between a Comet and a Currys? Who really enjoys traipsing through them?

So, you get a dash of the coffee shop from Neighbours:

The fresh juice bar is all part of a plan to entice customers in for longer. Sipping on smoothies they can sit at sleek new Apple computers surfing a select number of websites including social networks Bebo, MySpace and Facebook.

That'll certainly bring people in - after all, Apple Stores in the US had to block MySpace because its shops were getting overwhelmed with people updating their MySpaces and not buying - but will that lead to sales, or is HMV investing in providing enormous youth clubs?

A row down from the "social space" are terminals where shoppers scan the barcodes on CDs and DVDs, listen to and watch them and click on a buy button for free delivery of a copy to the customer's home.

So, you go in to town, fight your way through kids sipping smoothies and... can order your album to be sent to your house. And go home and wait for it. Why, exactly, would you bother to go into town to do this? You could hear the tracks online at home, order it, and wait. HMV, clearly, need to bring people into stores, but simply by adding a stage of 'going into town and going to a store' into the process of purchasing online isn't going to work.

Unless HMV is aiming squarely at people who don't have access to the internet elsewhere - not, we'd have thought, the same market who would be supping smoothies and stalking social networking sites.

Mr Fox hopes inspiring people to buy at least one item thanks to easier-to-navigate stores divided into areas like "watch", "listen" and "play" will make the economics of the refit work. At £100 per square foot, it means the price tag on Dudley's store is £800,000. If HMV decides to go ahead with 40 more next generation stores - it will decide after Christmas - the cost will be £20m.

Twenty million pounds? That's very, very serious money. I suspect they'd be better off spending it on a wider range of stock.

[Thanks to James P]