We have been thinking of getting another TV for the guest bedroom, which we are slowly turning into a home theatre/den (except, of course, when we have guests at home!) Having acquired many of the other components of a home theatre system, we needed a good TV to complete the picture (pun intended!). A LCD flat screen if we could afford it. So off we went to Vivek’s Adyar to check things out.

Down Lattice Bridge Road to the Adyar signal and left at Coronet, and we were lucky enough to get parking under the flyover right opposite Vivek’s. Pleased as punch, we locked the car and looked across the road at Vivek’s. And were quite shocked. In years gone by, Vivek’s Adyar was bright, well maintained, and had an air of success around it. Now it looked dead beat, run down, tired and weary, its façade dull and worn out. Even the area just in front and along the sides seemed care worn.

Never the less, we braved the traffic, along with another group of intrepid pedestrians and reached the other side safely. We ventured into the store to find it fairly bare (as compared to my last visit when it was bursting with durables on display) and also kind of care worn. The TV section was to the left as soon as you walk in, but the flat screen LCDs aren’t in evidence. You ask for them, and they point to where they are on the wall adjacent the door! Kind of silly, when they could have had such an image leader product visible as soon as you enter and turn left.

The Samsung, Sony and LG LCDs, of course, took our breath away with their clarity and colours! So much so we found ourselves quickly upping our budget to get a slightly larger one. Having feasted our eyes on this miracle of modern day electronic entertainment, we decided that we were going to have to buy it or never rest in peace. However, we would take a look around to ensure we were getting the right kind of deal of course. We then moved to the micro-wave oven section (ours is relatively old, with the front panel having become detachable on its own!)

This entire section too was not up to scratch, though the ovens were pretty good. We then took a look at the PCs. There’s an awesome fully loaded Intel dual core high end PC from HP for about forty grand with a flat screen that we fairly drooled over (as much as the TV!). As well as an HP high end lap top for a little over fifty. Hmmmmmm… should we upgrade our ten year old PC? How about the laptop? Choices, choices… There’s so much out there today that’s good, that we are often temped into buying something prematurely sometimes.

I came away happy with the products that we had seen. But pretty disturbed by the state of Vivek’s Adyar. We have been shopping at Vivek’s for years, mostly in T Nagar and Anna Nagar, as we used to live in T Nagar, and later Harrington Road and Kilpauk. But I was familiar with Vivek’s Adyar, having been there many times. We’ve always been pretty satisfied with our experiences at Vivek’s, but this visit clearly showed that age and lack of active interest in keeping the experience current is beginning to show. That’s a pity, because as the quality, variety and style of the products increase, a run down store only looks worse in comparison.

I only hope this is a temporary phase before renovating or something like that. Otherwise they are going to start losing regular customers like us. For it certainly doesn’t foster any confidence in the store.