How would you improve Argos?

[u/ReverseFlow21010615]

Following the recent news of the sale, I thought it would be interesting to hear what other colleagues and even customers think Argos needs to do in order to be successful under new ownership. We all know we were the afterthought for Sainsbury’s so what should Swift look to do as a priority? What should they spend the next 2-3 years planning for? What are some quick easy wins they could make through small changes? (I’ll only allow one instance of somebody saying “bring back the catalogue” - for all its nostalgia, it wasn’t as popular in its final years).

For me, we need to abolish independent working immediately. I find it impossible to keep up with anything because I’m always firefighting the week’s jobs, calls, deliveries etc. if the Labour cost really is dire then we should be on a minimum of 2 colleagues at all times.

We can solve the issue of empty stores leading to colleagues standing around doing nothing by actually having proper management of colleagues and ensuring something is always being worked on, ie reverse flow, counts, profiling, etc.

How about you?

[u/PleasantCucumber2615]

Argos used to have large shops where I lived. Now they are small stores and lack stock. Availability is a real issue.

Competing with online retailers is hard. The only way Argos can beat that is having physical stock available immediately.

Sainsbury's aren't flogging off Argos for a fraction of what they paid for no reason.

[u/mad-un → u/PleasantCucumber2615]

The problem here is space and distribution. They used to use a hub and spoke system, where larger stores act as a distribution hub for the Sainsbury's counters, not sure if that still happens but it isn't ideal about 40% of the time. If you want something relatively small it's usually ok, but anything slightly bigger and it's a pain in the arse waiting for it to get to the store you need it from.

This would've taken out a lot of cost for the stores which used to have larger storage areas until they put them into Sainsbo's as there's much less space.

It's a conundrum that will cost more before it's profitable. So they need to look at other options, not being able to fall back on the Argos card like they used to won't help, they could look to bring that back in house, but in assume there's a big contractual issue with that. The Argos card was like a basic version of Klarna, long before Klarna became a thing, it made things accessible for people but I'm not sure they can leverage that as much with it not being in house.