The Quietus - A new rock music and pop culture website

News

HMV To Close Up To 100 Stores
Laurie Tuffrey , February 4th, 2013 11:16

1,500 jobs at risk from closures set to be announced this week

HMV's administrators Deloitte are set to announce the closure of between 60 and 100 shops this week, reports the Telegraph.

This may mean up to 1,500 jobs will be lost after the closing stores sell off their remaining stock.

The move comes after the administrators and Hilco, the Canadian restructuring firm that bought up HMV's debt last month, decided that the chain's 223 UK stores need to be cut down to between 120 and 160 for it to remain a going concern.

It also follows the 190 redundancies Deloitte made in HMV's head office last week. While the job cuts were taking place, one of the employees, Poppy Rose, who was in charge of the chain's social media, live tweeted the process from the company's Twitter account @hmvtweets.

The now-deleted tweets read: "There are 60 of us being fired at once! Mass execution, of loyal employees who love the brand", "Just overheard our Marketing Director (he's staying, folks) ask 'How do I shut down Twitter?'" and "Under usual circumstances, we'd never dare do such a thing as this. However, when the company you dearly love is being ruined and those hard working individuals, who wanted to make hmv great again, have mostly been fired, there seemed no other choice."