You Can't Ignore Argos

On good grief! The new Argos catalogue is out and how big is it? What niche would you say Argos are addressing? Who is their target customer? What does the brand Argos, stand for? Probably best if you don't get a postcard ready for your answers, because the likelihood is you will spend the rest of your life sucking the end of your pen.

Argos don't just appear to sell everything you could ever possibly want but quite a few things you don't. And that is a problem, but so is the fact that they don't just sell broadly they sell so much of everything. When you open the catalogue searching for a particular item, you will find they sell at least half a dozen at very similar prices. As Stewie in Family Guy would say 'what the hell?' And who on earth can actually lift their catalogue? When my Eldest said he was going to pick up an Argos catalogue, because the new one was out I asked him to get me one too. I didn't realise I was putting him in danger of physical damage.

My wife hates going into an Argos store. She not only dislikes the queuing for a number to be called she dislikes some of the people who seem to be 'regular' customers. Me, I quite like the way the store works and certainly the introduction of technology to ease the experience. But the voice calling the numbers is the most irritating in the world. And I don't appreciate finding that the store is unexpectedly busy and so the two people  handing over the products can't cope. Not least when two 'managers' are chatting away to one side about store layout or some such. Either these 'managers' should pitch in to help out, or the company should reconsider the way they staff the stores. The last thing they need is public sector style bureaucracy.

There is clearly a panic settling in at the company though, if the sheer volume of money off, sale, voucher emails I am currently being bombarded with, is anything to go by. Like most people I would guess, the term 'sale' and quotes of enormous percentage reductions pass straight by me as they are meaningless. Do I like the offered price, or not? If ever a store needed to rationalise it is Argos and if ever there was a time it is now. They need perhaps to find some leadership that sets a proper identity for Argos, unburdens the company from the nightmare of ordering and stock-handling that must be prevalent (and an army of people handling the categories!), because it seems to an outside observer that there is a current lack of care. That the ship has been steered into becalmed waters is not the fault of the staff, so asking them to blow into the sails is not the answer. I would like Argos to do well, but I think they need to do things internally well before the customer base will do it's bit.