I would make one adjustment to your statement FE, and say that as a keen photographer that the problem now is that the camera on a phone is perceived as being so good that is becomes the only device. Part of the problem is that we rarely print photographs now. This is ironic as many phones compete on how many megapixels it has. Yet megapixels isn't really about quality, even if it might come up on your menu as image quality. Megapixels is about size of the picture. for what people use photos for, for Facebook, twitter and as screensaver/desktop for their phone or computer, they only need about 0.8 mp. The latest iPhone has a good 8 mp sensor, but put it into bad light and it struggles like mad like many of its competitors. People have been swayed by the megapixels.

It's bad for consumers when high street operators go out of business. Who do you speak to when you have a problem? From my experience as a store manager the majority of 'faulty' items were actually just user error. People couldn't get on the net, and I'd look at their settings and they had deleted the network settings.

In the end we will all pay the price. You can order in £ from many online retailers. How many of them are actually British? DigitalRev has pretty good prices, but they are a Hong Kong based retailer. Where are the tax pounds going? Too many people are looking at the base price and deciding on that alone. There will come a time when we all pay very dearly for that.

I was planning to be ordering things from Jessop's today, but had to order from elsewhere. Their base price was £10 cheaper than Jessop's but including delivery was only £1 cheaper. Jessops were delivering for free. So for 1£ extra in my pocket I lose so much more. If I have a problem that requires solving, I will incur postage prices. Let's hope it doesn't go faulty.

It's very sad news if we end up losing another national retailer. My experience of Jessop's was mainly positive, although I often found their customer service centre's service less than perfect.

My thoughts are with the staff. In the storesI found they had good knowledgeable staff.

Does anyone remember when they printed a monthly broadsheet price list that had every conceivable item large or small that was stocked by Jessops on it?

The typeface was so small that even around the early '90s when I didn't need reading glasses, I needed a large magnifying glass to read it!

I came across this comment on the dpreview site:

"How soon before Amazon is forced to open city-centre 'showrooms' where customers can come to touch the goods and get some expert service before placing their order? I guess they will wait until the last firm running the old "try it here, buy it elsewhere" business model finally goes to the wall."

How true.

BT

Screwfix, Toolstation and a number of other companies have now taken the 'local collection' and store route, so perhaps some companies are having a rethink, because it does seem to be successful for some?.

What I cannot understand is how Argos are always complaining about sales, yet going by the number of Argos stores within a twenty/thirty mile radius from where I live, they always seem to have plenty of customers.