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I read on BBC News about WHSmith thinking about selling their High Street and shopping centre stores which I think would be a very sad day if it did happen. - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cg7zj8yr5x7o - Certainly when I stay in various towns and cities around the UK in August, I often pop into a branch to get a local postcard and a copy of that day's local newspaper. And the firm has been going for well over two centuries with shops near railway stations originally, William Henry Smith probably didn't realise how sucessful his original enterprise would be in the decades to come. As recently as the pre-Covid pandemic in the late 2010s (and before I had subsciptions), I used to get over £10 of magazines and newspapers from WHSmith at the same time, including Radio Times; Private Eye; Best of British magazine and The Stage newspaper. Indeed, it was thanks to the wide range of magazines and newspapers on the shelves which allowed me to be interested in these publications in the first place. It was where I started to get interested in Private Eye, and the irony was that the company refused to stock the magazines in their stores well into the 1970s because of its adult content.
Does anyone also remember the late 1990s adverts which featured Nicholas Lyndhurst playing all the characters (including a teenage girl with plenty of Veet on "their" legs) and they were trying to make use of the "WH" prefix just like McDonald's have sucessfully done with the "Mc" prefix? It was around the same time as their Clubcard was launched which I made great use of, circa 1997-1999 when I started my signed photograph collection; writing to TV and radio stations; theatres; sports clubs; agents and other places to get autographs from the almost famous. I heavily used the Victoria Centre WHSmith to get envelopes, Basildon Bond-alike writing paper before I got my computer for typing the letters out, and of course, stamps. The Victoria Centre branch had been in the shopping centre since it opened in 1972 and it made me think whether its days could be numbered after the recent news. The WHSmith Clubcard was better than the Tesco one; for starters, one could get 10 points for every pound spent (or indeed, one point for every ten pence). And all of a sudden they stopped doing the Clubcard in the mid to late 2000s - it made me think that the main reason why the stopped it was because Tesco's loyalty card was also called Clubcard to this very day, and perhaps they thought that WHSmith also using the Clubcard name was a breach of copyright and forced them to stop calling it that? I know that at some point that I did assume that there was some association between Tesco and WHSmith because of their namesake loyalty cards at the time, and I thought that if you have one in your wallet, then you have both of them if you know what I mean.
It is one of the biggest non-food (sweets and chocolates excepted) stores that you can get almost everything from books (mostly autobiograhies of sporting celebrities) to pens and birthday cards to jigsaw puzzles. I know that they were in heavy competition with John Menzies for many years until "Ming" (cf the Liberal Democrats) actually went more low-key in the early 21st century. It was a store where I would make a beeline between Christmas and New Year to try and purchase calendars, diaries and anything that I wanted but didn't get as a Christmas present a couple of days before. I know that they did sell sweets in its early years and then stopped doing so for many years and then went back to doing so. And I also remember when they sold music as CDs and cassette tapes, and the other Nottingham WHSmith allowed you to "sample" some tracks with some headphones on after walking down toi a basement area to listen to them, with some jubebox-type machine operating it for the consumer's use. I think that when they sold videos, both pre-recorded and blank tapes, as well as music albums, (and that they were in competition with HMV and Our Price), that was the true WHSmith shopping experience, even as recently as the mid 1990s! There are shops and companies which overlap into their business such as Ryman - lesser well known, but still great whether you want a florescent highlighter pen or a Canon photocopier, and even the larger supermarkets seem to cover a lot of the familiar ground when it comes to stationery, greetings cards and of course, magazines whereas they didn't used to do that. The fact that I can get a Tesco own-brand reem of 500 sheets of A4 with my online grocery delivery is a godsend in many ways.
I just hope that it doesn't become another "do you remember Rumbelows?" company in just five years time, and the friendly arguements of people racking their brains and wondering "was it 1992 or 1993 when it went to administration?", and: "was it 1995 or 1996 when it went into liquidation and all the 428 High Street stores all closed down for good at the same time?" Wilko has still made huge gaps in High Street spaces; one Nottingham store is still empty with the Wilko logo still seen above, although some out-of-town branches have now got B&M Bargains or Home Bargains occupying their former stores. And Woolworths 15 years before that, had bit the dust where every business from Tesco Express and Iceland to Poundland and local charity shops had taken over their plot in the High Street. I don't like the incognito-ness of Argos stores; playing hide-and-seek inside major Sainsbury's, and the fact that their traditional twice-a-year catalogue, which was a publicity beacon for its shopping services, is no longer produced - it was almost like going to the theatre and purchasing a copy of the programme. I visited the Cardiff and Newport, Gwent branches of WHSmith last year and I have to say that will be missed if they were sold. It seems that the average High Street consumer has to keep up with the Smiths as well as the Joneses these days...
Does anyone also remember the late 1990s adverts which featured Nicholas Lyndhurst playing all the characters (including a teenage girl with plenty of Veet on "their" legs) and they were trying to make use of the "WH" prefix just like McDonald's have sucessfully done with the "Mc" prefix? It was around the same time as their Clubcard was launched which I made great use of, circa 1997-1999 when I started my signed photograph collection; writing to TV and radio stations; theatres; sports clubs; agents and other places to get autographs from the almost famous. I heavily used the Victoria Centre WHSmith to get envelopes, Basildon Bond-alike writing paper before I got my computer for typing the letters out, and of course, stamps. The Victoria Centre branch had been in the shopping centre since it opened in 1972 and it made me think whether its days could be numbered after the recent news. The WHSmith Clubcard was better than the Tesco one; for starters, one could get 10 points for every pound spent (or indeed, one point for every ten pence). And all of a sudden they stopped doing the Clubcard in the mid to late 2000s - it made me think that the main reason why the stopped it was because Tesco's loyalty card was also called Clubcard to this very day, and perhaps they thought that WHSmith also using the Clubcard name was a breach of copyright and forced them to stop calling it that? I know that at some point that I did assume that there was some association between Tesco and WHSmith because of their namesake loyalty cards at the time, and I thought that if you have one in your wallet, then you have both of them if you know what I mean.
It is one of the biggest non-food (sweets and chocolates excepted) stores that you can get almost everything from books (mostly autobiograhies of sporting celebrities) to pens and birthday cards to jigsaw puzzles. I know that they were in heavy competition with John Menzies for many years until "Ming" (cf the Liberal Democrats) actually went more low-key in the early 21st century. It was a store where I would make a beeline between Christmas and New Year to try and purchase calendars, diaries and anything that I wanted but didn't get as a Christmas present a couple of days before. I know that they did sell sweets in its early years and then stopped doing so for many years and then went back to doing so. And I also remember when they sold music as CDs and cassette tapes, and the other Nottingham WHSmith allowed you to "sample" some tracks with some headphones on after walking down toi a basement area to listen to them, with some jubebox-type machine operating it for the consumer's use. I think that when they sold videos, both pre-recorded and blank tapes, as well as music albums, (and that they were in competition with HMV and Our Price), that was the true WHSmith shopping experience, even as recently as the mid 1990s! There are shops and companies which overlap into their business such as Ryman - lesser well known, but still great whether you want a florescent highlighter pen or a Canon photocopier, and even the larger supermarkets seem to cover a lot of the familiar ground when it comes to stationery, greetings cards and of course, magazines whereas they didn't used to do that. The fact that I can get a Tesco own-brand reem of 500 sheets of A4 with my online grocery delivery is a godsend in many ways.
I just hope that it doesn't become another "do you remember Rumbelows?" company in just five years time, and the friendly arguements of people racking their brains and wondering "was it 1992 or 1993 when it went to administration?", and: "was it 1995 or 1996 when it went into liquidation and all the 428 High Street stores all closed down for good at the same time?" Wilko has still made huge gaps in High Street spaces; one Nottingham store is still empty with the Wilko logo still seen above, although some out-of-town branches have now got B&M Bargains or Home Bargains occupying their former stores. And Woolworths 15 years before that, had bit the dust where every business from Tesco Express and Iceland to Poundland and local charity shops had taken over their plot in the High Street. I don't like the incognito-ness of Argos stores; playing hide-and-seek inside major Sainsbury's, and the fact that their traditional twice-a-year catalogue, which was a publicity beacon for its shopping services, is no longer produced - it was almost like going to the theatre and purchasing a copy of the programme. I visited the Cardiff and Newport, Gwent branches of WHSmith last year and I have to say that will be missed if they were sold. It seems that the average High Street consumer has to keep up with the Smiths as well as the Joneses these days...
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