The company behind the Carphone Warehouse, Currys, and PC World brands has announced that it is to close 134 of its UK stores.
Dixons Carphone plans to merge the remaining PC World and Currys stores insert a Carphone Warehouse into each.
Dixons and Carphone Warehouse merged in mid-2014 to form Dixons Carphone. “Following the merger, it has become clear to us that customers really like our fully refurbished 3-in-1 store concept,” says group chief executive Seb James, “and we have decided to launch a major programme to roll this format out across the whole market and put the portfolio into its long-term state.”
Even though this sounds suspiciously like putting a positive spin on a negative move, that might not necessarily be the case. Dixons Carphone claims that the resulting impact on staff and sales numbers will be “neutral or better.”
In other words, Dixons Carphone might be shutting 11 percent of its UK stores, but it won’t be shedding any jobs. In fact, it might well create more.
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“When we build one beautiful, refitted new 3-in-1 superstore and we have one great Carphone Warehouse in town… sales go up and also we end up usually needing more colleagues to work on the shop floor,” James told the BBC.
Dixons Carphone is expecting to gain and extra £20 million a year in profit from 2017 onwards. The company says it will be investing £50 million into refurbishing its newly combined 3-in-1 stores.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
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