21st Century Dodos: A Collection of Endangered Objects (and Other Stuff) (13 page)

Before the days of loyalty cards and Nectar points, we had Green Shield Stamps. These were small, about the size of a postage stamp, and dispensed from machines at the tills of many supermarkets, petrol stations, and corner shops. Customers collected them and stuck them into books; completed books could then be traded in for items of differing value from a catalogue, or from one of the many Green Shield Stamp catalogue shops.

You had to collect loads of the buggers to be able to get hold of anything remotely worthwhile, but that didn’t stop the little green things proliferating across the ’60s and ’70s.

You would need to spend a little over £32 to fill one book. That was a lot of money in those days, equivalent to over £350 today. That one book, which would have taken you considerable time to fill, could be exchanged for items such as a mouth organ or a brush and comb set.

More serious collectors, those who stacked up piles of books, could go for rather grander fare. In the 1960s, 33¼ books would get you a Kenwood Chef, an item many kitchens would have been proud to have. Of course, the amount of money you would have to spend to obtain said food mixer was about the price of a small car. Although, to be fair, if you were spending the money on your weekly shop and petrol anyway, it was just a case of being patient and licking lots of stamps.

The company was founded in 1958 by Richard Tompkins, who adapted an idea from the United States to fit the British and Irish markets. It was hugely successful for nearly two decades, and there were many imitators, including S&H Pink Stamps, Yellow Stamps, Blue Star, and Happy Clubs. At one point in the early ’60s there was even a ‘Stamp War’ when Fine Fare supermarkets started offering
the Pink Stamps, and Tesco countered by giving away Green Shield Stamps for the first time.

The business came a cropper in the late-’70s, when competition between supermarkets hit new heights, and customers were more interested in cheap produce than collecting stamps. When Tesco pulled out of the scheme in 1977, the writing was on the wall for the little green shield.

The company limped on until 1983, when it stopped issuing stamps altogether. There was an attempt to reinvent the scheme in the late ’80s, but by 1991 the Green Shield Stamp company was no more.

It does live on, however, in some form at least. The Green Shield Stamp catalogue shops were rebranded as Argos in 1973, and continue trading to this day, with people actually paying cash for items that previous generations would get for free after purchasing 2,500 packets of fish fingers over 13 years, or something like that.

And, of course, the concept was brought up to date in recent years by the introduction of loyalty cards, air miles, and Nectar points.

Dodo Rating:

High Street Names

This is a roll call of chains and shops that were once on every high street in the country, but are now no longer with us. How many did you use to shop in?

Abbey National, ABC Cinemas, Alfred Marks, Andy’s Records,

Anglian Building Society, Athena, Bejam, Bradford & Bingley,

Brentford Nylons, C&A, Canon Cinemas, Chelsea Girl,

Concept Man, Courts, Curtess, Deep Pan Pizza Co., DER,

Dewhursts, DH Evans, Dickens & Jones, Dillons, Dixons,

Dominics Wine Merchants, Elf, Etam, Fina, Fine Fare, Fosters,

Freeman, Hardy & Willis, Gateway, Golden Egg Restaurants,

Granada, Happy Eater, Home & Colonial, International,

James Thin, John Menzies, Lilley & Skinner, Liptons,

Littlewoods, Lyons Cafés, MFI, Midland Bank, Mister Byrite,

MVC, NafNaf, National Provincial Bank, Ottakars, Our Price,

Payless, Pizzaland, Pollards, Presto, Principles, Radio Rentals,

Ratners, Rediffusion, Richard Shops, Rumbelows, Safeway,

Savacentre, Saxone, Swan & Edgar, Tandy, Texas Homecare,

The Electricity Shop, The Gas Shop, Thresher, Timothy Whites,

Tower Records, Unwins, VG, Victoria Wine, Wavy Line,

Woolwich, Woolworths, World of Leather.

These are just a small selection of well-known names that have gone bust, been rebranded or taken over, or just slowly faded away over the past couple of decades. Now let’s have a closer look at the stories behind the demise of some of these.

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Woolworths

In almost every town in the UK there remains a Woolworths-sized hole, often in a very real and physical sense.

The company went bust in 2009, with the loss of over 800 stores and 27,000 jobs. At its peak, there were over 1,100 Woolworths shops across the UK.

Originally an American company founded by F.W. Woolworth, the tycoon was proud of his English heritage and embarked upon a controversial transatlantic expansion programme, opening his first UK store in Liverpool in 1909, much against the advice of many of his business partners.

His ‘nickel and dime’ store concept translated well to the British market, and the range of household goods at affordable prices was a considerable success, allowing him to expand across the country, hitting the peak of store numbers in the 1960s.

The ‘wonder of Woolies’, as an old advertising campaign went, became a national institution, and there was hardly a high street in the land that didn’t have a branch with its readily identifiable logo hanging above the door.

Over the decades since the stores first opened, the chain experimented with many different product lines but always kept affordable homeware at the heart of its offer. These were joined by music and video (for many years Woolworths was the leading entertainment retailer in the country), clothing (the Ladybird range for kids), restaurants (the place to go if you were a pensioner in search of a good fry-up), toys (the Chad Valley label), and, most importantly of all, pick ’n’ mix sweets.

Everyone at some point in their lives would have shopped in a branch of Woolworths, most people doing so several times a month. They were part of the fabric of our society.

So, what went wrong?

Well, in the early ’80s the American parent company sold the UK stores to the Kingfisher Group and, while the chain continued to thrive under new ownership, it also expanded into other areas, including book and CD distribution. Supermarkets were increasingly offering similar ranges, and customers were picking up the products they’d normally buy from Woolworths while doing their weekly grocery shop. Perhaps the biggest single impact was the digital revolution in music. The company was a major player in CD sales, but in a few short years the market collapsed and management struggled to find a way to fill the gap. Whereas its closest rival in this area, HMV, was able to expand into DVD box sets, computer games, and entertainment hardware, Woolworths didn’t manage to pull the punters in for the same product.

Whatever the reason, by the late 2000s they were really struggling and, seemingly overnight, the whole chain collapsed. Woolworths was placed into administration in November 2008, and the final branch closed in January 2009.

Ironically, the closing-down sales across the stores brought the company’s best trading days ever, with tens of millions of pounds being spent every day by customers keen to pick up a bargain (some lines were reduced by 90%), or perhaps just wanting to bid farewell to a shop that had been there all of their lives. Most high streets were left with a big gap to fill, and over 300 Woolworths branches remain empty as of 2011.

Many of the old sites have been snapped up by other retailers, and a few have even been bought by ex-Woolworths staff. A former employee in Dorchester re-opened her branch as Wellworths, just two months after it closed down. It is still doing well. The Woolworths name itself is now used to front an online retail business.

Businesses go bust all the time, well-known names are merged, taken over, or bought out, but it is rare for the whole nation to
mourn their loss. We all grew up with Woolworths. We bought our first LPs there. Flirted with our first girlfriends or boyfriends over the counter. We worked there. We rotted our teeth on the pick ’n’ mix. We won a few quid on the lottery. We picked up our copy of
Heat
magazine. We trod its linoleum aisles, along with the rest of the nation.

And now it is no more. It is sorely missed.

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Midland Bank

The Midland Bank was founded as the Birmingham and Midland Bank in 1836, adopting its shorter name in 1923. It became the largest deposit bank in the world, and, throughout the last century, was a fixture of the high street in nearly every town in the UK.

Then it was taken over by HSBC, never to be heard of again.

Mergers and acquisitions take place all the time in the world of high finance, so this did not necessarily come as a surprise, but it is unusual for such an established institution to vanish completely.

People tend to have a lifelong relationship with their bank. They perhaps open an account as a child, somewhere to put their birthday and Christmas money, receiving their first cashpoint card as a teenager, before graduating to a ‘grown-up’ account. They get a job and see their monthly salary paid in, they take a loan for their first car, buy a house, get a mortgage, store their savings. All with the same bank.