The end of an era

This Christmas has seen the end of what used to be a very important shop in England - maybe in Wales, Scotland and Ireland too. When I was a child, Woolworths used to have a shop in every high street. And a lot of very good premises they had too.

Before my time, they used to have a policy that nothing cost more than, I think, one shilling. Presumably some pounds in today's money. But so as not to restrict their stock too much, some things were sold in bits. So if you wanted to buy a carpenter's plane, the three parts were sold separately.

In my time, they used to sell quite a lot of dry goods. Cheese, bacon and biscuits. The interesting part of the biscuits being that as well as branded biscuits in packets, they also sold biscuits loose, from tins, a tin cube with sides a bit less than a foot, the sort of tin which I still know as a biscuit tin, although I have not seen such a thing for many years. And if you were really short of money they also sold broken biscuits for half the price of whole ones.

More recently, in Epsom, Woolworths has sold little more than sweets, DVDs and a selection of the sort of junk you can pick up in market stalls. I think they also sold their buildings and leased them back - an arrangement perhaps designed to reduce their tax liability. Or perhaps just to free up funds for expansion. Or to transfer funds to their holding company.

This last being relevant now that they have gone into administration, the word we use now for going bankrupt. Gone into administration, with the shops selling everything, down to and including the shop fittings. In one store, I even saw them stripping the shelving off the walls, taking them down to the bare bricks. We are told that the administrators, one of the big firms of accountants, will make lots of millions out of doing the job - while the staff, never well paid in the first place, will probably not get their redundancy. The way of the world we live in, I suppose.

As a footnote, I record that, as a child, Woolworths was bottom of the premier league shops in Cambridge when it came to girls' employment. First Joshua Taylor, then Eaden Lilley, then Robert Sayle, then Marks and Spencer, then Boots and last of all Woolworths. They took the bottoms of all the classes. On the other hand they lasted longer than Joshua Taylor and Eaden Lilley, both old style, independant department stores which are long gone.