B&Q Rejecting Cash?

[Huge]

Simple answer; tell Mr Gates where to shove his expensive, buggy, bloated crap and use something else. There are plenty of alternatives.

[John Cartmell]

My main computer is 10 years old - but still lets me produce a colour computer magazine for sale in your local newsagent.

[John Cartmell]

Did that a long time ago. ;-) But my point was that Dixons, Curry's, PCWorld, &c don't offer you a choice. There is one option (very occasionally two) in a range of boxes.

[Huge]

I never started using it in the first place. I first sat in front of a Windows box around NT4. I was appalled.

Given that they're the same firm ...

... which I never go in.

[david lang]

Same as any company floated on the stock exchange - constant pressure for short term returns, no long term strategy. It's destroying British business.

Dave

[Huge]

That'll be the "no long term strategy" that, let's see, built the QE2 bridge, for example. Or that finances 999 year leases?

The same way it's "destroying" the world's largest economy?

[david lang]

They get investors lured by huge returns. Companies like B&Q make average returns that would satisfy a private owner, but not the stock market investors. Slightest sign of a quiet patch and they panic. A private owner would be patient and ride it out.

Entirely different financial climate. Try borrowing money from a UK bank to develop & market a new product. In the USA they seem happy to support new ideas, hence the inovative products.

Dave

Dave

[Andy Hall]

There needs to be both.

Without a good short term, there is no long term, especially for the retail sector and even more especially for a retail warehousing operation like this who offer no real incentive other than price and stock availability to buy from them.

They do it to themselves, ably assisted by their customers.

[Andy Hall]

There are a whole bunch of issues there. We have far too much baggage of the "professions".

Generally the British are considered to be highly inventive. It all falls apart when it comes to being entrepreneurial. There are still the vestiges of the old "professions" in parts of the financial sector who remain risk averse. There is then the cultural value that we have that it is "not quite nice" to make money. The assumption is that if you are, then it is at the expense of somebody else. Of course this is a nonsense because the point is that the pie should become larger. Those willing to take risk should be rewarded, while those who are not should not expect to benefit.

We then have the burden of huge employment costs with socialised medicine and all the rest of it. Americans invest in the UK for three reasons. a) they kind of understand the language b) the legal system is approximately the same and c) the cost of employment and if need be the ability to get rid of people is about the least onerous in Europe.

Until these attitudes change, then little else will.

[Capitol]

Can't agree. B & Q are giving very poor returns on capital employed. No private owner would accept this. The stock market is exactly as it's name suggests, a market, if your stock is inadequately performing, the price falls, and it's up to the directors to sort out the problem. At the present time B & Q are in trouble because their product offering is not what the customers want to buy. Having recently viewed their US competitors, it's obvious that they have fallen badly behind the consumer wants in the products which they are offering. The Xmas lighting products B & Q shown locally were not a patch on the offerings of the nearby privately owned garden centre and compared to a US shop, did not even register as a potential purchase. They currently have no innovative products worth a second glance. Another superb example of British retail management performing normally!

Regards Capitol