Argos to close all Irish stores starting March

TVs here were and still are a slightly different spec here.

Without throwing the thread too far into a tangent, the Irish broadcasters (though RTE Networks 2RN) joined a group called NORDIG, which develops and maintains open standards for the Scandinavian countries, Finland, Iceland and Ireland.

RTE Networks did approach the UK agencies, but they weren’t interested in international partnerships or sharing standards, so the NORDIG group membership made more sense. Saorview was developed using that system of open standards and Irish broadcasters can participate as a full member.

The differences between DVB-T variants aren’t huge, so most TVs have no issue with tuning Saorview or Freeview (and multiple other systems), but there are slight differences. Some UK only spec TVs may just tune Saorview on strange high channels numbers or possibly not see the EPG at all. Older non-HD TVs from the UK can’t tune Saorview at all, as they don’t support MPEG4.

In the analogue era, RTE historically used VHF and UHF frequencies while the the UK only used an small range of UHF channels. Irish TVs also had to be able to tune a wider range of bands to support analogue cable compatibility. So UK spec tuners couldn’t see the full range of channels and often couldn’t tune in RTE if it was in VHF.

Argos only used UK supply chains in its earlier days, so just didn’t sell televisions. It certainly wasn’t anything to do with protecting Irish retail. It was just sheer disinterest in having any kind of localised sourcing / buying. Everything came from the mothership.

There were issues with landline phones too. They were all sold with UK (BT) plugs that didn’t fit the RJ11 wall sockets used here. Most worked with a plug adapter, but some didn’t support Caller ID properly (Eir used an open European spec. BT had its own variant of this.)

Some phones and faxes wouldn’t even ring, if they were expecting the very odd BT 3rd wire ring. You used to need quite complicated adapters for certain phones that had to have a capacitor in them to mimic a UK ‘master socket’

Basically, Argos didn’t really see the Irish market as worth localising for. It’s not at all surprising that post Brexit they’ve just pulled out.

UK retailers are often a bit weird like that. I can’t imagine a French retailer failing to localise things in Belgium for example.

Unfortunately, none of this is anything we’ve any control over. The UK left the EU, the single market and the Customs Union. Ireland didn’t change anything and we can’t really remedy most of this. Following them out would be economically suicidal, given the much larger scale of connection to the rest of Europe, and we wouldn’t even have a formal trading partnership with the UK anyway, even if we did. We would be back to the days of being informally dependent on a large neighbour, yet having no input into that very unequal relationship.

There’s really very little we can do to mitigate this other than ditch UK derived standards and avoid ever getting into that trap again.

It just shows though if you’re a small country, never, ever, ever adopt and become dependent by inertia on weird specs from a large neighbour, and always use the most open standards possible.

Our issues with the UK are RHD cars which is extremely difficult to get around and on a more minor annoyance the weird plugs and sockets have supply chain issues by making ireland a slightly odd market that is out of step with the entire continent and beyond. It’s less of a big deal but it’s still a hindrance to free trade.

The food / drink sector is also a huge one as there’s familiarity with brands and similarities in taste which means UK products have a big market here historically. So many will just continue to be imported regardless, which is possibly feeding into inflation.

Just launch a range of tiny multi-coloured pencils and tiny colouring books.

Ot tiny sketch pads and call them “old school selfies”

Think outside the box!!

Uh actually CeX was originally setup as a video games and computer specialist.

Besides any cex closing is not a sign of bigger things because they’re almost all owned by franchisees in Ireland and I imagine the majority in the UK are similar.

Cex are very transparent about setting up a franchise as well. They reckon you need about €250k to get setup (stock + fitting the store out) and if the business isn’t working out (provided you meet certain conditions) they’ll buy you out and take over themselves. That doesn’t sound to me like a business in decline anyway.

Argos in Ireland honestly had a better chance if they went a similar route to UK— meaning they started opening outlets in sainsbury’s. Just wouldn’t fly here none of the major supermarkets would be bothered cos it would cut into their business a bit (Tesco & Dunnes mainly).

Well actually no they couldn’t have.

Aldi & Lidl are not even worth talking about, they’re stores are all carbon copies and laid out very specifically. Obviously due to being in the real world some stores will vary slightly but the basic premise is identical across them all. Where do you think an Argos would fit in your local Aldi?

SuperValu is just a brand owned by musgraves, they do operate some stores themselves but the majority of them are franchisees. So who’s paying for Argos to integrate into the store? What’s the level of disruption to the locals who may use SuperValu as their staple shop (maybe it’s their only supermarket) there would be war. That’s assuming you could convince the franchise owners to gut the shops and fit an Argos.

I’m not trying to even imply it could’ve saved Argos, I mainly mentioned it as an alternative to high rental costs they claimed were major factors in deciding to leave. But chances are the investment to integrate into SuperValu’s/Aldi/Lidl/Tesco etc would’ve have been far greater than they were willing to chance. Cos if it goes tits up… well that’s a nice waste of cash.