THESE are grim days on our High Streets. Dear old Debenhams, 242 years old, survived recessions, the Great Depression and two world wars, but has now fallen victim to the twin killer blows of online shopping and the pandemic. A hoped-for rescue deal from JD Sports collapsed, and 12,000 jobs are now at risk.
The news came on the same day that the Arcadia empire, which includes Topshop, Burton and Dorothy Perkins, went into administration, putting a further 13,000 jobs in jeopardy.
The timing, in the final run-up to Christmas, could hardly be worse. But it is not without precedent, and a notable one at that.
In November, 2008, the much-loved Woolworths chain entered administration. On December 17, administrators announced that all 807 Woolworths stores in the UK would be closed by early in the new year.
Woolworths, which we regarded as a British institution, was of course American in origin – Frank Winfield Woolworth opened his first successful fixed price store (everything five cents) in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1879. Ten cent lines were added two years later. In 1909 Woolworth opened his first store outside North America: 5c and 10c became 3d and 6d for the branch in Liverpool, England.
Frank Woolworth died from septic poisoning from a tooth infection in 1919, aged 66. One obituary read: “He made his money not by selling a little for a lot, but by selling a lot for a little.” It was an ethos that went down big on these shores. Woolworths became the go-to store for children’s clothes, toys, records, garden tools, kitchen equipment, and much else – most notably the ubiquitous pic’n’mix sweets. That was what pocket money was invented for.
But a combination of bad management decisions, high rents, competition from online shopping and – irony of ironies – from pound shops, brought about the chain’s demise.
On January 6, 2009, the last stores closed their doors. Our main picture shows shoppers scrambling for last-day bargains at failed spin-off, Big W, in Edinburgh. Above, the sad scene after the shutters came down for the last time in Glasgow’s Argyle Street Woolies.
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