Virgin Megastores UK

The company was established by Richard Branson, originally as a small record shop, and became a national chain.

Richard Branson & Nik Powell had initially run a small record shop called Virgin Records and Tapes on Notting Hill Gate, London, specialising particularly in "krautrock" imports, and offering bean bags and free vegetarian food for the benefit of customers listening to the music on offer.

The first release on the label was the progressive rock album Tubular Bells by multi-instrumentalist Mike Oldfield in 1973.

"[5] By February 2009, Zavvi had closed its stores, selling some to rival HMV, and a few to Simon Douglas and Les Whitfield's Head Entertainment.

Later this service was stopped and shops played CDs from stock over their own in-shop stereo systems.

This means that now all inventory updates every 15 minutes, giving an accurate representation of on hand stockholding as well as being a useful tool for producing Best-Seller reports.

Virgin also had an online service, http://www.virginmegastores.co.uk,[6] which stocked the same entertainment products as the high street shops and had a 48-hour home delivery guarantee with gift wrapping.

There were approximately 17 Virgin XS shops and they were all located in mainly small units within factory outlet centres throughout the UK.

Competition against independent retailers mainly in the music sector did not pose a major threat for big companies such as the Megastores at the time of the Zavvi rebranding.

However, customers with a specialist taste usually found the independent shops more appealing, offering more hard-to-find and rarer titles; the firm also suffered from the growing competition from online retailers.