Last week. WHSmith (WHS) announced that it is putting its five-hundred high-street stores up for sale, in order to focus its energies on expanding its 1000+ stores in railway stations and airports. Few shoppers will mourn the loss of this rather dowdy, over-priced chain, but the death of this brand is historic, because the business was founded as long ago as 1792 – the year when Great Britain went to war with Revolutionary France - and the first railway station bookstall was opened in 1848.
In 1966 I left school aged eighteen and went to work for WHS as a management trainee. I trained in all sorts of places including Crouch End and Temple Fortune in London, as well as Walsall and Bolton before spending about two-and-a-half-years as the manager of a small branch in Chiswick, West London, when I was twenty-two. The business was then publicly quoted, but still controlled by its founding families, the Smiths, Hornbys and Aclands; scions of these families occupied many of the board positions. It was a paternalistic employer, even owning a convalescent home for members of the staff who were recovering from serious illness. The firm invested a lot in staff training. There were internal residential courses held in an opulent former stately home in the Cotswolds, and I studied for an HNC in Business Studies at WHSmith’s expense and in their time. I doubt that such opportunities are open to today’s minimum-wage, zero-hours-contracted employees.
The business at that time consisted of the chain of high-street shops, a network of wholesale newsagents who had local monopolies in many towns, and the railway station bookstalls, which really only sold newspapers and magazines. The high-street shops were the powerhouse of “the firm;” as the managing families called it, with branches in lots of London suburbs, many provincial towns and cities and in nearly all of the then-thriving seaside holiday resorts, such as Brighton, Bournemouth and Blackpool. I think a lot of the decline of so many of the high-street chains can partly be blamed on the changing tastes of the British holidaymaker. It was in those resorts on wet summer days that the real money was made. The wholesale network was sold off in 2007 and, from about this time, the company began to invest heavily in its travel branches, which now operate in airports in an astonishing thirty-two countries and sell everything from a sandwich to a computer.
But this is about changing customer tastes and habits, and the decline of the high-street. Let’s look at the things that WHS sold in the 1970s. Firstly, we sold newspapers and magazines, which supermarkets then didn‘t sell, and which had far higher readership than today. For example, the circulation of the Daily Mail in 1970 was over two million. Today, it is less than half that. If you wanted to buy a camera magazine, then our shop was here you had to go. You couldn’t get it in Tesco’s.
And of course, WHS was then the country’s largest bookseller. It sold a much wider range of books than it does today, including a reasonable range of fiction and biography. But the staple products were cookery and gardening books, dictionaries and reference books. Today, cookbooks are sold in supermarkets, and in much smaller volumes because, if I need a recipe, I just reach for my phone. I don’t need a dictionary either. And, in 1970, Waterstones, who today provide a far better retail book-buying experience than WHS ever did, did not exist. Tim Waterstone was just a WHSmith executive who branched out on his own when WHS fired him in 1982. WHS actually bought Waterstones from him in 1993 but sold it to the now-defunct HMV five years later. As a result of competition from Waterstones and of course Amazon, the range of books that WHS now sells is radically diminished. Waterstones is one of the few success stories of the high street in the current decade.
The chain was a big seller of vinyl records and CDs until the early years of this century, when that market was totally destroyed by, first of all iTunes, and then music streaming. I mourn the loss of the physical music industry, as it provided artists and songwriters with a stable, durable, income in a way that music streaming doesn‘t. WHS closed all its record departments at the same time that the Virgin Megastores and the HMV chains collapsed between 2008 and 2012.
But the WHS of the 1970s was a really good stationer. Lots of the things that were big sellers then no longer have any purpose. Who needs a photo album today, or a diary, or a calendar? All of these staple items have moved online, as have personalised Christmas cards, which were big business at that time. Looking at how tastes have changed, online services have grown exponentially, and new competitors have emerged it is surprising that WHS on the high street has survived so long, given that stores such as Woolworths and the Virgin Megastores disappeared more than fifteen years ago.
Although retail sales staff have never been well-paid, this was not the case for managers. In 1970, the manager of a large WHS store could earn more than £3,500 per year, which is equivalent to well over £100,000 today. Last week WHS announced that 102 management roles are to be cut from its surviving travel arm, where the average salary for a store manager is just over £27,000 per year. No wonder that our small towns are poorer than they used to be. In 1973 I decided that retail was not the place I wanted to be, and almost accidentally embarked on a new, and fulfilling career in information technology. I made the right decision, but I am grateful for my early years in WHS, and the basic business education it gave me, even though I can find very few reasons to visit these rather overpriced and down-at-heel stores today.
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