Woolworths: The Rise and Fall

According the UK Guardian News: "Woolworths: the rise and fall of the department store empire. The cheap and cheerful chain that became an amazingly successful US import has now outlived its usefulness."

Woolworths: opened a store every 17 days in the 1920s. Photograph: Stephen Kelly/PA

When Woolworths first flung open its doors in New York in 1879, it was the Victorian equivalent of the £1 shop, selling everything from stationery to dish cloths for just five cents. But like other American exports, the chain would soon become a quintessentially British institution, with a presence on almost every high street and a unique place in the hearts of the nation's shoppers.

In the 99 years since it established a UK presence in Liverpool, millions of us have wandered down its aisles in search of our first record or to choose a pair of cheap football boots.

Founded by Frank Winfield Woolworth, a brash, anglophile American who claimed he could trace his family routes back to Wooley in Cambridgeshire, Woolworths had dozens of outlets across the US by the time it arrived on British shores, and its owner had already made his fortune.

Woolworth travelled to Europe to source goods for the company and harboured an ambition to bring his American retailing sensation to the old country. "I believe that a good penny and sixpence store, run by a live Yankee, would be a sensation here," he wrote in his diary.

His instincts were right, although it was 19 years before he was finally able to prove it.

On his first visit to Europe, following a long voyage across the Atlantic that left him seasick and disorientated, Woolworth's ship docked in Liverpool and he chose the city, then at the height of its economic power, as the location for his first British store.

It opened in Church Street on Friday November 5 1909 to enthusiastic reviews from the local press. "The handsome premises were thronged the whole time they were open," the Liverpool Courier reported. "6d is the highest price charged for any single article in the establishment, but the variety of articles obtainable is infinite'.

Predictably, perhaps, the Daily Mail, was less enthusiastic, declaring the American upstarts had chosen Liverpool so they could make a quick escape back home once their venture failed, leaving their unpaid debts behind them.
Within a generation, however, there were nearly 500 stores in Britain, run by Woolworth's protégé William Stephenson. a young freight clerk he met in a Staffordshire pottery. By the time Stephenson retired in 1948, he had built the British arm into a huge concern, floating it on the London Stock Exchange and becoming one the country's richest men.

The company expanded rapidly. In the mid-1920s, it was opening a store every 17 days, to the delight of local councillors who regarded the arrival of its distinctive red fascia as a stamp of approval for their town.

The 1931 flotation gave the British management increased confidence and autonomy from the head office in New York and, the following year, Woolworth's successor, Byron Miller, observed: "The child has long since outgrown the parent, generating more profit and taking hold more quickly than the American company ever did."

After the second world war, growth stagnated as competitors began to open self-service stores, an innovation Woolworths was quick to copy but slow to roll out. The first Woolworths to dispense with traditional counters and serving staff opened in Cobham, Surrey, in March 1955, but the revamp was only used in new stores. Rivals, including supermarkets, who rolled out the new concept faster, soon began to eat into its market share.

In the 1970s, an average of 15 stores were closed each year to fund the renovation of more modern outlets but, at the start of the 1980s, Woolworths still had 1,000 shops and was beginning to expand into out-of-town locations.
In 1997, the US Woolies, now owned by a rival American retailer, announced it was closing its remaining 400 FW Woolworth stores, but its British arm remained in rude health. It became part of retail giant Kingfisher, owner of B&Q, but was floated as a separate company in 2001.

Since then, it has struggled to fend for itself, battling stock shortages, facing an aborted bid attempt by retail billionaire Sir Philip Green, issuing profit warnings and failing to persuade a new generation of shoppers to visit its increasingly unfashionable stores.

The enthusiasm which greeted its arrival in the UK has been replaced by indifference from consumers and, aside from the pick and mix confectionery counter, it is no longer clear what the store is for. Unlike the shoe polish, tea towels and cheap china plates it stocks, Woolies has outlived its usefulness and many of its products can be bought more cheaply elsewhere.

Now Woolworths itself likely to be sold for £1, an irony that Frank Woolworth would probably not have appreciated.

Source: UK Guardian News.