The wonder of Woolies

This morning the sales signs were being cleared from the windows of the now closed Woolworths store in Regent Street. It will leave a big gap in the town centre… but probably only physically. With every passing acquisition and demerger — of which there were several — the offering and Woolworths was diminished. Much of its hardware range was lost to B&Q and much of its electrical range to Comet, both of which were once part of the same group. The Woolworths of my childhood was a store more like Wilkinson is today. In its final years, Woolworths seemed to be the home of a narrow range of overpriced low quality goods. Its one bright point was its chocolate range at Easter, but a store chain cannot survive on chocolate eggs alone.

In the end, the wonder of Woolies was that it survived quite as long as it did.