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Comment by hkt | Hacker News Reader

BHS was never good in my lifetime. These companies haven't kept up with the times mostly. John Lewis deserves honourable mention for being really quite good both offline and online. The rest are dreadful and deserve their fate because they just will not modernise.

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John Lewis is great, I buy from there over Amazon wherever possible. It's a worker co-op too, which is nice.

We've read the horror stories about Amazon (shitty products, misleading pic, etc), I wonder if a new concept for department stores can "solve" this problem by having the ability to look at the products/for the customer to go somewhere and talk to the manager in case they get a lemon.

In Germany, I know electronic stores like Saturn or Mediamarkt already have the same prices in store as their website, to somewhat reduce the bleeding of their brick and mortar.

I do the same for the same reason. I've never worked anywhere with a workplace democracy but I'm glad the workers at John Lewis get that.

I bought lots of kitchenware from John Lewis over the years because I simply don't trust Amazon to sell me anything that touches food.

Or electricity

I bought an artistic light as a present from Amazon, for about £15. John Lewis had something that looked similar, but a bit nicer, and was about £100. Amazon light arrived two weeks later. Person plugged it in. Bulb immediately blew. Person replaced bulb. Ring main RCD tripped. Person gave light (now unwrapped) back to me. A 13A fuse was installed on a "110V max 100W" luminaire, with evidence of melted plastic (Britain uses 230 VAC, and a ≈1A fuse would be safe). Cheap Chinese crap is dangerous.

Debenhams used to feel pretty sad and run down even when the shop was pretty new - I think I only ever visited one of their shops once and that was walking through to get to the car park.

Debenhams near me had their staff on min wage 0 hour contracts, which on top of being morally dubious meant they weren't able to afford to buy anything from Debenhams and clearly no one had invested in their training so they didn't know or care about anything on sale there. It was pretty indistinguishable from Primark apart from the general style of clothes (not quality), and that was before Primark opened what looks suspiciously like a department store in Birmingham

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