Another High Street Rebrand

[Martin Phillp]

From my experience today, staff were able to get through the transactions a lot faster, although there was one trade customer who asked for a VAT receipt and had to ask a colleague how to do it.

Having a monitor to see the all of your goods is a nice touch, but could do with increasing the font size. The staff log-in interface looks a lot nicer too.

[rdobbie]

Certainly an interesting approach to a rebrand – it appears that the former Thomas Cook staff re-employed by Hays Travel have been told to create their own temporary signage!

(Pics are from various local news sites over the last few days)

Still, it's mightily impressive that Hays are delivering on their promise to reopen all 555 of the Thomas Cook shops in such a short space of time – as of today they've already reopened 413.

[all new Phil]

I really want it to do well. I do. But I just don’t know.

[cdd]

So they’re reviving the unprofitable part of the business, but not the profitable bit. I don’t see it working out well. TA margins are wafer thin these days, especially for airlines.

[Ben]

I was a bit surprised to see them reopen my local branch as there has been an existing Hays nearby for years.

[JAS84]

There must be quite a few places with two Hays near each other now. Maybe they'll close some and redeploy staff later on? They must've simply taken over the existing leases when they bought the store portfolio. They had no time to renegotiate them.

[Pete]

It's taken the full year but we now seem to be in the position where only the mysterious Just Right remains in the older packaging

[bilky asko]

It's taken the full year but we now seem to be in the position where only the mysterious Just Right remains in the older packaging

I always wondered why their most expensive cereal had the cheapest looking box design.

[gottago]

I went past the Coral betting shop on Warren St in London this morning which is reopening soon after refurbishment and interestingly it looks like it might also be a coffee shop. It was full of plush sofas and nice interiors. An interesting attempt at getting a different demographic to begin crippling gambling addictions.

Coincidently this is diagonally opposite (ish) what will soon be Central London's first Lidl.

[Hermes]

New look Virgin Money in Manchester

[woah]

The former B Works unit. It looks like B customers are the first to transition to Virgin Money, which is really just a re-branded version of B anyway and seems to be using the existing Yorkshire/Clydesdale Bank infrastructure in favour of the Virgin one, presumably because the old Virgin current account was fairly rubbish and didn't have up to date features like Google Pay/Apple Pay and such.

Oddly though they're now pointing Yorkshire/Clydesdale customers to Virgin Money for credit cards which uses a totally different platform and (rubbish) app and have no support at all for Google Pay. Virgin Money is already a bit all over the place with different platforms for savings, credit cards, and mortgages and oddly limited support for some things in their stores (like paying off credit cards with debit cards) and I imagine rolling Yorkshire/Clydesdale branches into that whole thing is going to make things very confusing.

Likewise the fact that there will be two different Virgin Money apps that only support some of the accounts you can hold with them.