“..Chain store massacre:..a bittersweet farewell to Woolworths..”
“..On a lonely shelf at the back of an understocked store in a south-east London shopping centre, a big, blonde, half-price teddy bear sits staring glumly at his paws.
“Is this what it’s come to?,” he seems to be asking himself.
Just shy of its centenary year, in the last month before Christmas – when business ought to be booming –Woolworths, the poor bear’s employer, is going out of business altogether.
Let’s pause to consider the colossal significance of that.
Despite its American roots, Woolworths managed, from the moment it arrived on our shores, to assume a quintessentially British identity.
Unlike McDonald’s incongruous golden arches or GAP’s preppy khakis, “Woolies” seemed to be the perfect fit for the British high street.
Its enduring contribution to our national consumer culture could be the pick’n'mix counter, which still dominates the front of every branch.
To stand on the store’s peeling linoleum beneath strip lighting and scoop jelly babies into a paper bag is to enjoy an experience familiar to every generation since 1945.
The chain survived the austerity of the post-war years, the Winter of Discontent, the boom and bust of the Eighties and Nineties.
But the global financial crisis has finally brought the faltering retail giant to its knees..”
go to source/story>>Chain store massacre: Tim Walker bids a bittersweet farewell to Woolworths - This Britain, UK - The Independent