In Acle if the kitchen moved to the seating area, and the seating
moved to where the kitchen area is then customers would look out of
windows overlooking a small woodland,, and fields at most other Little
Chef branches.
Little Chef, move your windows.
As news breaks of the last ever bag of Woolworths Pick n’ Mix selling on Ebay for £14,500 I thought I’d pen some thoughts on the whole demise of the high street and why some people deserve recognition for doing something typically British: keep calm and carry on.
It was great to read about Claire Robertson, the former ‘Woolworths of Dorchester’ branch manager who is taking the courage to reopen her store, the very same store administrators closed when Woolworths Plc went into administration late last year.
Britain loves to get behind the underdog and this story about one shop has generated local, national and international coverage; it has created enough buzz and press to unintentionally steal the limelight from Shop Direct, who won the auction for Woolworths trading name earlier this month. I wonder how many former Woolworth store managers and staff teams are looking on and thinking “why are we not doing that with our own old store?”
What Ms Robertson has successfully tapped into is that Woolworth’s does not have to be called Woolworths to be Woolworths, and with a little twist and affectionate nod to the old name her ‘Wellworths’ venture is enough to win curiosity and respect while successfully generating nothing but praise and admiration at the same time.
What the people at ‘Shop Direct’ are missing from their totally online re-birth of the Woolworths brand is that all they own is the Woolworths name, and we the British public know that. The British public and its purse had already left Woolworths, and those who had shopped at Woolworths right up to its closure will now be discovering other retailers. The key thing the British public will remember about ‘Woolies’ was it was a value and convenience store, based on the high street, and they will remember too that although it remained convenient, it was no longer a place of value and sent out confusing signals about what it sold and why people should step inside.
While I aged and grew out of Woolworths the younger generation failed to even grow into it, Woolworths was not selling what the market demanded and promptly went out of business. As a child of the 80’s Woolworths was a place where toys lived, as I got older it became a place where music and DVD’s were purchased before it was more cost effective to buy them (as a download) online. In my early twenties Woolworths was the place to buy Easter eggs before it was cheaper and more convenient to get them in the supermarket as part of the weekly shop. The big problem Woolworths had was that it had become a store that survived on its customers wandering through it and picking up things on impulse, and a shop like that has no place in a recession, which is exactly why it went bust and the likes of Theo Paphitis and other retail turnaround specialists did not spend their children’s inheritance to wade in and rescue the company.
The other big problem Woolworths had failed to fight was the rise of two competitors who started to beat it at its own business model, ‘Wilkinson’s’ and ‘Pound Land’. Pound Land trades from stores much the same size as Woolworths while Wilkinsons went for larger shops with a bigger range at a lower prices. While the music industry moved to digital download unlike Woolworths the team at Wilkinsons scaled down its CD and DVD operations and focused much more on home style products. Pound Land filled the front of its store with low priced kitchen and bathroom consumables which drew the customer in and while they were there a Pound Land basket would then be filled with things people don’t really need, but are too good a price to miss. Last time I was in Pound Land I bought a trowel, iPod charging lead, two wallpaper scrapers, some kitchen roll and a packet of Jammie Dodgers. A fiver would not stretch that much in Woolworths, but in its heyday, it would have. Woolworths invented the low price thrift model in the UK and then let two rivals (and others) grow in their market and do it better than them, Wilkinson’s even joined in on the Pick ‘n Mix, and did that cheaper too, Wilco’s was beating Woolies at the its own game.
It could be argued that Woolworths products were always good quality, I’m cautious now of the things that are carried by Pound Land, the screwdrivers are made of cheap metal that is breaks away when turning a screw, the glasses are too thin and crack when dropped in a sink, and the razor blades are too blunt, but they only cost a pound, what do we expect? Sadly to compete with these stores I’d argue that in the last couple of years for the first time the buyers at Woolworths started to buy in low quality products of their own, at a higher price, and started to scare even more customers away.
A quick surf over to my colleague Hal MacLean’s blog and he reflects: “It’s a shame Woolies has gone, but in the cold light of day you have got to ask what on earth were their buyers doing?! How completely out of touch.” And Hal is right, as he pockets for nostalgic reasons his ‘Life-like (?) Animal’ for the severely discounted price which ‘Pound Land’ would have sold him a packet of five for even less. Hal declines the other ‘bargain’ offers which include an ironing board which looks like its straight out of the 70’s, a 1999 S Club Calendar and a tatty well thumbed Christmas Single from Cliff Richard, available for just 19p. Woolworths failed to re-invent itself in the last ten years, and ultimately paid the price as its customers passed the entrance of their store on route to Wilkinsons and Pound Land, it is no wonder that the wonder of Woolies was wonder no more.
What must have hurt Woolworths even more was how the Wilkinson’s chain did not always move into the heart of the town centre, where Woolies was king. Wilkinson’s strategy appears to have been to take over the large old supermarket sites, abandoned in the 90’s when the likes of Tesco, Gateway, Safeway and Sainsbury moved out of town to newly built mega stores with big car parks. Woolies customers walked further to find Wilkinson’s and found them in the old run down 1970’s style precinct. The arrival of Wilkinson’s brought new life to the old shops that surrounded their store which had previously suffered from a lack of footfall when the likes of Sainsbury moved out years previous. Not only had Wilkinson’s successfully moved the customer, they also moved the centre of the high street.
But there is still a place for Woolworths on the high street and what Claire Robertson is doing in Dorchester is going to prove that, this new business will not fail. In interviews this entrepreneur stated that Woolworths of Dorchester had always been profitable and with this knowledge has set about turning a profit under the new brand, ‘Wellworths’. Wellworths (or ‘Wellies’ as it is already being called locally in Dorchester) is no small undertaking. Robertson sent her CV to the landlord, formed a company through a consortium, raised finance, secured the trading name ‘Wellworths’ and employed over twenty of her former colleagues and now the real challenge starts as she has to now fill 6500 square feet of store space with products that the people of the town actually want to buy, and failure to do this by Woolworths and their bizarre selection of goods was the reason why the company ultimately failed.
Wellworths of Dorchester will benefit from managing its own stock, making its own policies and trying out new ideas without clearance from the board of Directors, and gone too are the days of a delivery of ‘life-like animals’ as stock. Wellworths is in the fortunate position of being first at grabbing the headlines since the close of this iconic chain and in being that they will become a pilgrimage for reminiscing former Woolworth customers and employees spanning the last 99 years as they holiday to the south coast for years to come, and on top of the local customers, these people will buy from things there, it is even safe to sell tat, people will buy it.
The most exciting part of setting up a new business is not having to action the very out of touch decisions and initiatives that out of touch senior people that are paid far too much money think is right for a business they don’t actually understand. I had previously worked for an organisation that had grown in twenty years into a healthy and profitable venture which had grown to achieve an internationally respected reputation. In 2006 a management change at the most senior level at the parent University saw a slow and painful process which ultimately resulted in what one professor spent his life building, another professor spent two years pulling apart. I wrote about it at the time I was made redundant and each time I’ve re-read what I’d written I’ve taken some of the anger out of it. At the time a headteacher from a school I worked with in New Zealand on hearing the news wrote to me and said…
“Change is good for us but we don’t usually like the thought. Remember the old sayin…..When the winds of change blow, some build walls while others build windmills.” I can just see those windmills springing up everywhere.”
And they did.
Two years on and I’m now sitting at the same furniture I sat at when employed by my previous employer, I’m on the same chair, using the some of the same equipment and answering the very same telephone number. Project partners and clients followed us as a team of those made redundant joined together to form a company, under a new brand. Like Claire Robertson, we believed that things did not have to come to an end, and two years later we’re thriving, employing new people and working on high profile new business which involves designing new learning spaces, building new software, visioning change and helping people to make their big idea happen. Our clients include the BBC, NHS, Macmillan Cancer Relief, Government departments, local authorities, schools, colleges and universities nationwide. The key to our success so far has been in believing in ourselves, taking risks and not forgetting where we came from. Ultimately, this is one thing we have in common with Woolworths. Woolies employed excellent staff at store level, trained them well and ultimately retained them and the fact that the majority of the Dorchester staff have returned to the fold under a new brand is testiment to their work ethos. The way the Woolworths team worked together to close their business down and action the administrators requirements was worlds apart in comparison to the chaos over at MFI.
There was some talk in a revival of the name of the organisation I used to work with as part of a merger of retained staff from various department closures, the apparent decision was quite rightly not to use the old name because former clients and partners knew it was not the same people standing behind the brand, and this too is the same with Woolies, it was the people in each branch which made each store the success it was, even as it closed.
News has also broken about Tony Page, Andy Latham and Steve Jebson, three former Woolworths bosses who failed to secure the ‘Woolworths’ brand name but still plan to relaunch fifty of the former profitable stores in their original premises under a similar name. Again, another great sign of the highstreet fighting back, and an opportunity already for the Dorchester consortium to earn money from franchising the ‘Wellworths’ brand to them. Maybe Page and his team will call their stores ‘Wallworths’ or ‘Willworths, although ‘Wallys’ and ‘Willys’ don’t have the same ring to them as Wellworths ‘Wellies’. I wonder if the team at Shop Direct have seen the opportunity here to add some substance to their totally online business by offering Tony Page and his team a deal to use the old ‘Woolworths’ brand; it makes sense for the two companies to share the name and strike a deal which means that they don’t enter each others markets, one concentrates on stores, the other deals online.
I’m not convinced Woolworths online will be a successful business. I’m nervous of totally online traders with the exception of Amazon and Play.com who have build their businesses as the internet evolved, learning valuable lessons along the way, and have become brilliant at what they do. As British consumers we’re well known for liking to complain and because Amazon and Play.com’s business model is so good they rarely make a mistake, this is why we use them, this is why they are so successful. When it comes to the likes of other stores online I’ll buy from them if they also have a brick and mortar presence which I can walk into, faulty product in hand, and cause a fuss.
The new Woolworths wont have the old people, and won’t have any bricks and mortar, so why would I shop there? We all know at least one company that we’ve had a bad experience with and will avoid like the plague, joining the list for me alongside Thomas Cook, HSBC, Pontin’s and Texaco is British Gas. I’m in dispute with British Gas over an electricity bill which is so wrong I’ve had to involve a solicitor. Had British Gas had a shop on the high street which I could have walked into, sat down and gone through the details face to face, rather than spend hours being passed through, fobbed off, and cut off by a undermanned centralised customer service department which lacks the ability for me to point at various pieces of factual paper, then I don’t think this situation would have got legal. Unfortunately, like the rest of the utility companies, British Gas moved out of the high street, and became a challenge to approach, I’m hoping the new Woolworths online will get this right, even as I write this their holding website has gone down. Not all businesses need bricks and mortar to do well online, the rise of Wink online bingo has emerged and fearlessly taken on an established market by appealing to the younger audience, a clever and effective strategy, so totally online can work, I’m amazed that the online retailers are not offering their customers free bingo sessions as loyalty rewards in the same way bricks and mortar businesses give away loyalty points.
We British love a comeback, and how it is done is so important, take Dirty Den for example, some things are just best left dead and buried. When MFI tried to relaunch itself with the slogon “we’ve changed, have you?” and subsequently went bust I was among the crowds of people who queued up and battled to get a bargain. There was no real sorrow for the chain which had tried so hard to reinvent itself so many times and struggled to shake off its poor reputation, people have long memories, even though I’ve travelled in countless comfortable Skoda taxi’s, I’d never buy one. My parents had always struggled with MFI furniture purchases as I grew up, with bits missing and poorly finished goods I’d automatically discounted them when buying furniture myself. It is only now, after spending a lot of money on stock purchased from the administrators that I can conclude that it is very good stuff and I’d buy more, but I can’t, they are bust. On the last day of MFI in Chelmsford I was helped by, and also helped complete strangers load vans, carry out purchases and dismantle wardrobes, there is something about the British banding together to help each other out when stripping a failing business of its remaining assets. There is also something very British about getting behind a good business, even so much to deserve a page on Wikipedia.
And how fitting for radio personality Chris Evans a comeback success story in his own right volunteering to open the new Dorchester store. Chris has successfully reinvented himself from being the loud controversial breakfast presenter, late night tv host, and Radio 1 DJ of the 90’s to become the calm and easy listening presenter who winds down the aging Radio 2 audience on their way home from work. Who would have predicted Terry Wogan and Chris Evans on the same frequency ten years ago? Chris successfully did what what Wellworths is going to go on and do, reinvent itself to meet the needs of todays market. The fact that Chris has offered to bring his own scissors and tape is a telling sign of how difficult it is to buy things on the British high street at the moment, lets hope there is a Wilkinson’s on route the day he opens the shop.