It is rare that I feel moved enough to put pen to paper and comment on something that has attracted so much talk already, but the impending demise of Woolworths and the closure of all its stores is an event that cannot pass without being adequately lamented.

I’ve got friends who worked for them, and for their associated companies who are all staring at Christmas with a redundancy notice in their hands, and for them and all their colleagues you cannot help but feel a great deal. It goes deeper than that, however. The brand and its stores were once so strong, so dominant and so important it feels almost criminal to see them vanish without a trace. This then is my story of growing up with Woolies.

Put simply, if you were a teenager in Harrogate in the 1980s, then the big branch of Woolworths on Cambridge Street was your first destination for anything musical. Sure, Boots and WH Smiths sold music too, but in there it almost seemed like an afterthought, the singles rack in Boots in particular designed almost to discourage casual browsing.

Woolworths on the other hand was the closest we had to a musical mecca. They had the big floor to ceiling rack that had slots for every Top 75 single, plus new releases, plus down the bottom the bargain rack where older releases were flogged off for 45p a go. Most of the front corner of the store was taken up with the racks of LPs, many of which were lovingly studied for song lyrics by eager music lovers like myself, dreaming of the disposable income to snap them up. My first ever handful of singles was bought with Christmas money in January 1987. Every single one I plucked from its appropriate slot in the racks and joyfully presented at the counter. I still have every single one – ‘Reet Petite’ by Jackie Wilson, ‘The Final Countdown’ by Europe, ‘Take My Breath Away’ by Berlin, ‘Santa Claus Is On The Dole’ by Spitting Image and ‘Over The Hills And Far Away’ (limited edition double pack single) by Gary Moore.

When I was given my first proper record player as a 14th birthday present, I told my sister what album I wanted to go with it. She returned from a shopping trip to Harrogate with the prize ready to wrap. I know she got it from Woolworths, it was the same single copy of the album I had spent the past two months dreaming of owning – when I went back to the store it was no longer in the racks.

I can flick through by own record collection to this day and remember which ones I bought from the Harrogate Woolworths, just how many weeks I’d had to save to do so and often the circumstances behind each one. Even my copy of Now 17 has a story behind it, the first copy I bought one lunchtime only having a single disc inside when I got it home. I returned it the next day, handing it to the assistant with a smile and asking her “see if you can work out what is wrong with it”.

Woolworths dominated the high street. If you met friends in town on a Saturday afternoon, you did it outside Woolies or on the benches just opposite. Its placing affected the other stores around it as well. Indeed if you live in Harrogate, ever wondered why there is a narrow staircase leading out from the back of the store that emerges out onto the road next to Argos on Oxford Street? That is because Argos used to be Shoppers World, one of a small chain of catalogue shops own by Woolworths until the early 80s. The staircase passage used to emerge directly onto the sales floor of the catalogue shop and was only bricked up and diverted out onto the street when the chain closed down and the premises were turned into Argos.

Eventually I stopped going. I left school and moved away, and apparently just at the right time. When returning to Harrogate for one university holiday, I entered Woolworths to discover the entire music section had been rearranged and dare I say it emasculated. Gone were the racks of records and floor to ceiling stacks of singles. In their place a rather tatty looking set of shelves bolted to the wall, with stock arranged with what appeared to be no form or reason. I could no longer imagine spending the hours that I did browsing. In 1994 HMV opened their huge central Leeds superstore in the Headrow Centre. I now had a new place to worship.

Not that Woolworths ceased to be a major music retailer, far from it. Strange though it may have seemed to hardcore music buyers like myself, for a great many people it was the casual destination of choice, and such was their continuing market share that the decisions of Woolworths product buyers could make or break a record. I never truly acknowledged it for fear of attaching to it a significance it didn’t deserve, but in the late 90s much was made of the significance of the Woolworths Six. Their corporate policy during the period of massive chart turnover was to only stock the six biggest new releases of the week. There was no hard and fast rule, but it was always possible to guess the highest new entries of the week, based on what Woolworths had elected to make available. Indeed on the rare occasion their buyers guessed incorrectly, you could see the effects when they made up for lost time. Check out the extended chart run of ‘Amazed’ by Lonestar in 2000. After nine weeks around it shot up to a brand new peak of 21. That was the week Woolworths finally decided to stock the single.

It wasn’t so long ago that Woolworths was still a worthwhile destination for many things. One of the first tales I ever told on this blog was of accidentally entering the Edgware Road branch during a lunch hour with an item that still had its security tag attached and having to buy some kitchen scales just so I didn’t look like a shoplifter when I set the alarms off going out. When I moved to East London, it was with some joy that we discovered the presence in Beckton of a Big W, their short lived move towards large out of town retail superstores. Trust me, that place was fantastic. The building blocks of the first ever home I made with my future wife were all picked up at that store. To this day we drink out of the mugs, toast bread on the toaster, sleep on the bedspreads and sheets and in the living room walk across the rug that was bought on that first trip to the store. A year later when restocking for a new flat we returned and bought everything we needed under that one roof. That to me was the future of the business and a sign that they were moving in the right direction.

Which made it all the stranger that the company abandoned the superstore model. A couple of years ago we made the journey out once again with the intention of spending a large sum on various household items. Instead we found half the floor space blocked off, most product lines slashed in size and many areas such as plants and clothing removed altogether. For probably the first time in my life I was compelled to approach the customer services desk and ask to see the manager, spending ten minutes expressing my disappointment as to why her store was suddenly so shit. She muttered lines about corporate strategy and customer focus, but had no answer to my ultimate point that I had made the journey to the out of town site with a specific plan to spend over £150 on various items, but was instead leaving with a small fraction and having spent just £20 as it was no longer the shop I believed it to be. We’ve never been back, for they simply got it badly wrong.

From there you can see where the rot set in, Woolworths was just run by people who clearly had no idea what to do with the brand or their stores. From being the first place you visited on a shopping trip, they were the destination of last resort. Wander wound and you would find tired displays, shabby looking product lines with even the tills placed haphazardly at the entrance. The receptacles for the baskets were tiny and poorly designed, almost as if they didn’t expect anyone to emerge from the depths of the store with more than one or two items. If I’d taken the time out to care it would have been heartbreaking to see the brand in such terminal
decline.

In my lifetime there have been many well known high street names that have either vanished or been swallowed up by larger entities. There are after all no more Bejams or Kwik Saves, no more Rumbelows or DER to buy televisions from, no more Dillons or Hammicks to go shopping for books. The impending demise of Woolworths is however something to genuinely lament. Not only was it a fixture on every high street and a core part of the record retailing sector but through its branding, its catalogues, its traditional Christmas TV ads and its ubiquitous presence in everyone’s lives, was an important part of British culture. Those managers who ran it into the ground and left it to die should be aware of what they have taken away from us, and what effectively can never be replaced.

So long Woolies, and thanks.