Unfortunately Jessops has had more than their fair share of problems. My local is Swansea. The local town centre has been dying for ages, and is now a mass of Pawn shops, pound shops and an Argos. Each time I have been in to Jessops, the service levels have been below par. I could go on and say how frustrated I have been with customer service and support levels, but at the end of the day what matters is that 1300 people will be out of a job.
One of the main reasons they have closed early is due to the amount of stock held. Stock has been in pitiful supply for a while, therefore most of the display stock will be returned to the distributer and what can will be sold. I echo the comments that people are saying, I love buying in the high street, but I dont want to be fleeced for the privilege, plus, when I order something from Jessops, and have to wait a few days for it to come in there is no incentive for me to buy in store when I can go online and save myself the agro of driving 10 miles in to the store to collect it.
Its swings and roundabouts really. Jessops as a big multinational pushed out the smaller retailers years ago, buy having better buying power and offering greater discounts often slashing costs forcing the smaller guys to give in and close.
Although this data is a little out of date
http://www.worksmart.org.uk/company/company.php?id=01097345 this shows the earnings for the directors in the company. The director had an increase of 65.88% over 7 years. Im pretty sure the company, since it was floated was going downhill. Directors remuneration, stood at nearly 700k. According to data, it states that there are 46 directors in the company. How much does their total salary bill come to?
People who are saying adapt or fail. Need to realise that Jessops did try and do this. However, with massive overheads, staff wages, insurance, pensions, tax and all the other things they had to pay for, its just not worth while anymore. When compared to a business such as Amazon who have a warehouse with a few hundred people, a market place where they make money by doing nothing and various other channels of revenue generation things need to be done. As some have mentioned, services are one way that the company can generate extra income and to some extent they do this inform of extended warranties, but this obviously isnt enough to generate a significant level of revenue.
As drastic as it sounds, some form of Internet tax will need to be introduced over the next few years to help high street retailers compete with online companies, or price fixing needs to be introduced again. Yes all these seem unpleasant, but at the end of the day we need the high street to survive.