Britain’s Woolworths is pulling down the shades
Before the arrival of Wal-Mart, before the anything-for-a-pound stores, there was always good ol’ “Woolies.”
Children scooped up hard candy from its bins. Homemakers checked out the latest kitchen gadgets. Husbands waited outside.
But after 99 years in business, Woolworths, an institution on shopping streets throughout Britain -- and once the U.S. -- is going out of business, a victim of changing times.
The company announced Wednesday that its 807 British stores would close their doors by Jan. 5. About 27,000 employees are expected to lose their jobs over the Christmas holidays.
Thousands more shoppers who had grown up with Woolworths, who dropped in on their lunch hours or hunted for bargains on weekends, will be bereft.
“It’s terrible. It’s iconic in England,” Evelyn Gavshon, 47, said as she prowled the aisles in “one last farewell” to a Woolworths in North London, one of two close to her home that she visited often. “I find it so depressing.”
The Woolworths Group company is a descendant of the original F.W. Woolworth chain that began in the U.S. in 1879. England’s first store opened in Liverpool in 1909, and in 1982 the British chain split off from its American parent, whose last remaining five-and-dimes closed more than a decade ago.
Woolworths Group has been operating at a loss for years. Saddled with debt estimated at $580 million, it went into receivership last month, still hoping a buyer might emerge. But amid the global credit crunch, the onset of recession and a gloomy consumer outlook, no realistic offers were forthcoming, leaving executives and the accountants now in charge of the firm with little choice but to pack it in and call it a century.
“It is a very difficult situation for a lot of people, particularly the staff, and we are trying to deal with it in as sensitive a way as possible,” Neville Kahn of Deloitte, the firm jointly in charge of administering Woolworths since the end of November, told reporters.
The company’s demise is another blow to the struggling British economy, where highflying bankers and assembly-line workers alike have seen their livelihoods threatened and bank accounts shrivel in recent months. The government released unemployment figures Wednesday showing Britain’s jobless figure at an 11-year high, with about 1.86 million people out of work.
But beyond the economic fallout from Woolworths’ closure is the psychological effect, the sense many Britons have of losing an old friend -- one that had grown a little fusty and worn around the edges, perhaps, but a friend nonetheless.
The chain had survived two World Wars by having a reputation as a stolid, reliable retailer that offered average folk everything they needed to outfit their homes. In towns and cities across the country, Woolworths was a mainstay, as seemingly immovable as the street corner it occupied.
“The thing about Woolworths is that it’s across the board -- all household items [at] reasonable prices,” said Robert Thomson, 65, a retired accountant who used to shop at the local Woolies with his schoolmates. “You know what you can buy.”
In recent years, the company struggled to stay relevant as luxury goods, single-brand stores and Internet shopping made Woolworths appear unglamorous and behind the times. Young people had increasingly little use for its serviceable but unexciting merchandise -- except, perhaps, for discount CDs and the famous “pic ‘n’ mix” bins of candy of every description.
Nostalgia wasn’t enough to keep the stores viable in a cutthroat retail environment.
After the company went bankrupt, potential buyers from all over the world expressed interest, but Kahn acknowledged that talks never came close to a final deal.
“There are those who are interested and see a future for Woolworths on the high street,” Kahn said, using the British term for main street. “The challenge is the finance that’s going to be required to stock up and get a new Woolworths going” -- financing that may be too hard to come by in today’s frigid lending climate.
At the store in North London where Gavshon searched for last-minute items, the shelves looked as if they had been plundered by pirates, adding to the feeling of an ignoble end for a once-mighty retailer. Unwanted teddy bears gazed forlornly into space and patterned crockery -- solid but old-fashioned, like Woolworths itself -- sat gathering dust.
Gavshon had a few clothes hangers in her cart; she had already dropped by several times in the last week or two as the discounts got deeper.
“I keep on thinking, ‘One last time, one last time,’ ” she said with a sigh.
Then she went on wandering the aisles.
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