Free 21st Century Dodos: A Collection of Endangered Objects (and Other Stuff) by Steve Stack Page B

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Woolworths
    In almost every town in the UK there remains a Woolworths-sized hole, often in a very real and physical sense.
    The company went bust in 2009, with the loss of over 800 stores and 27,000 jobs. At its peak, there were over 1,100 Woolworths shops across the UK.
    Originally an American company founded by F.W. Woolworth, the tycoon was proud of his English heritage and embarked upon a controversial transatlantic expansion programme, opening his first UK store in Liverpool in 1909, much against the advice of many of his business partners.
    His ‘nickel and dime’ store concept translated well to the British market, and the range of household goods at affordable prices was a considerable success, allowing him to expand across the country, hitting the peak of store numbers in the 1960s.
    The ‘wonder of Woolies’, as an old advertising campaign went, became a national institution, and there was hardly a high street in the land that didn’t have a branch with its readily identifiable logo hanging above the door.
    Over the decades since the stores first opened, the chain experimented with many different product lines but always kept affordable homeware at the heart of its offer. These were joined by music and video (for many years Woolworths was the leading entertainment retailer in the country), clothing (the Ladybird range for kids), restaurants (the place to go if you were a pensioner in search of a good fry-up), toys (the Chad Valley label), and, most importantly of all, pick ’n’ mix sweets.
    Everyone at some point in their lives would have shopped in a branch of Woolworths, most people doing so several times a month. They were part of the fabric of our society.
    So, what went wrong?

    Well, in the early ’80s the American parent company sold the UK stores to the Kingfisher Group and, while the chain continued to thrive under new ownership, it also expanded into other areas, including book and CD distribution. Supermarkets were increasingly offering similar ranges, and customers were picking up the products they’d normally buy from Woolworths while doing their weekly grocery shop. Perhaps the biggest single impact was the digital revolution in music. The company was a major player in CD sales, but in a few short years the market collapsed and management struggled to find a way to fill the gap. Whereas its closest rival in this area, HMV, was able to expand into DVD box sets, computer games, and entertainment hardware, Woolworths didn’t manage to pull the punters in for the same product.
    Whatever the reason, by the late 2000s they were really struggling and, seemingly overnight, the whole chain collapsed. Woolworths was placed into administration in November 2008, and the final branch closed in January 2009.
    Ironically, the closing-down sales across the stores brought the company’s best trading days ever, with tens of millions of pounds being spent every day by customers keen to pick up a bargain (some lines were reduced by 90%), or perhaps just wanting to bid farewell to a shop that had been there all of their lives. Most high streets were left with a big gap to fill, and over 300 Woolworths branches remain empty as of 2011.
    Many of the old sites have been snapped up by other retailers, and a few have even been bought by ex-Woolworths staff. A former employee in Dorchester re-opened her branch as Wellworths, just two months after it closed down. It is still doing well. The Woolworths name itself is now used to front an online retail business.
    Businesses go bust all the time, well-known names are merged, taken over, or bought out, but it is rare for the whole nation tomourn their loss. We all grew up with Woolworths. We bought our first LPs there. Flirted with our first girlfriends or boyfriends over the counter. We worked there. We rotted our teeth on the pick ’n’ mix. We won a few quid on the lottery. We picked up our copy of Heat magazine. We trod its linoleum aisles, along with the