The £1 Shop

If, when I’m in the UK, I ever venture out shopping with J, there’s always a major argument. She wants to hit Bond Street, or the local equivalent and I want to find the nearest ‘Pound Shop’. You know the ones. Everything costs a pound. I can rummage through those shops for hours seeking out bargains. I love it. I’m almost beside myself when I come across something I normally buy in the major shop chains, such as shaving stuff or deodorants, razors or bits for the garage.

But now, with the credit crunch hitting almost everything which moves on the High Street, the words, ‘Pound Shop’, have a whole new meaning.

Last month you could have bought Woolworths for £1. Yup – you could have bought all 850 UK stores for a measly quid. You would have had to take on 35,000 staff and their debt of £365 million but so what – 850 toy and sweet shops for £1 !!

Woolworths have a special place in my heart. As a 3 year old I remember going to the Woolworths store round the corner from our house in Glasgow. It was a vast store , or to a 3 year old it was. My mother would prop my pram up against the counter side and there I would watch the man take a small piece off of the huge block of butter and then, mesmerisingly, pat it between two blocks of wood until it formed a perfect cube or rectangle and then he would wrap it up in greaseproof paper.

My mother would then head for the biscuit counter where, because we were not well off, she would buy a bag of broken biscuits, which I would be into as soon as it was placed in the pram. Oh happy days!

Fast forward 30 years and J and I are living in Windsor. Every Saturday morning, we’d head into town and invariably end up in Woolies so I could buy some CDs or gardening stuff or even things for the kitchen or the garage. It was a one-stop shop for me but that was it’s problem. It was too many things to too many people but if you were to stop 100 people today and ask them what Woolies meant to them, the vast majority would say, ‘Pick and Mix’, their sweet counter.

Unfortunately, things are not too sweet today for the shareholders or the staff. Woolworths did not find a buyer and went under after 100 years on the high street.

Annother ‘institution’ which recently went under the hammer for £1, was the London Evening Standard, a tabloid newspaper with a daily circulation running into hundreds of thousands. In London, at the end of the working day, it is impossible to go further than a few yards before bumping into someone reading the Standard. It’s everywhere, and a very good paper it is too with an award winning web site confusingly called ‘This is London’. You would have thought, seeing virtually every second person in one of the world’s most populous capitals reading the Standard, that its finances would have been sound but alas, no. The Standard was losing some £35 million per annum and so it was sold, lock stock and fancy Kensington offices to …….. yup – a Russian, for the princely sum of £1. Oh – and he used to be a member of the KGB which would have made the reporting of the Russian dissident, Litvinenko, who was poisoned in London a few years ago, very, very interesting!

So – step right up and buy yourself the UK’s biggest sweet shop or London’s biggest newspaper for £1. Oh, and if the UK government hadn’t spent some of my well-earned taxes saving the banks, I bet you could have bought yourself a nice little financial institution for the same amount.