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

by Steve Stack

  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.

  Dodo Rating:

  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.

  Dodo Rating:

  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.

  So when their trusted bank, where they have placed their money all their lives, is absorbed into another company, it is a big deal, and worthy of note.

  Even if you didn’t bank with Midland, you will remember their logo – a golden griffin surrounded by a circle of coins – and their slogan, ‘the listening bank’. You would have seen them in TV adverts, on billboards, and illuminated outside their branches. They really were everywhere.

  And now they are nowhere, replaced by, to give them their full name, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation.

  Not quite the same, is it?

  Dodo Rating:

  C&A

  Of course, not all chains that have vanished from our high streets have disappeared from the face of the earth completely. C&A, purveyors of reasonably priced clothes for the discerning man and woman about town, closed down their UK stores in 2001, in the face of competition from supermarkets and other discount designer chains, but across Europe they continue to be a major player.

  So much so that Beyoncé (she who would have preferred you to put a ring on it) has her own clothing line in conjunction with the chain.

  In the UK, brands such as Clockhouse, Palomino, and Yessica made them popular with both sexes and they were often the store that mothers didn’t mind their children buying clothes from – their ranges being cheap and relatively fashionable. Their ‘Man at C&A’ advertising campaign offered smart trousers and shirts to the impressionable teenager intent on wowing the girl at the forthcoming school disco. They were also the go-to store for cheap salopettes for school skiing trips.

  The gap left by the departure of C&A was quickly filled by Primark, New Look, Matalan, and the like, so you wouldn’t really know they were ever here.

  Unless, that is, you remember purchasing your first pair of waffled trousers there in 1981. As many of us do.

  Dodo Rating:

  Our Price

  At its peak, Our Price was the second biggest music retailer in the country behind Woolworths (before then there was a time when Woolies, WH Smith, and Boots were the three largest, can you imagine?!), with over 300 stores
across the country. Originally set up as a cassette specialist, the loyalty to the format continued for much of its existence, with plenty of space given over to tapes even when they were clearly on the way out.

  Founded in 1972, the chain went through the hands of several owners, most notably WH Smith, who bought it in 1986, but they each managed to maintain the fairly ramshackle indie feel, helped by the wire rack displays and handwritten header cards. There was an Our Price in almost every major town, and many music lovers aged 30+ will have an LP, cassette, or CD somewhere in their collection that still bears an Our Price sticker.

  During the mid-to late-’80s, Our Price faced stiff competition from the HMV chain, and the larger, bolder, and more fashionable newcomer soon overtook its smaller rival. This marked the beginning of the end. A period of rebranding as Virgin stores did nothing to reverse its fortunes and the chain finally went under in early 2004, with all the stock being sold to Oxfam.

  Our Price still exists in two incarnations, however. There is an online company supplying music memorabilia to charities, and there is also an original Our Price store sitting empty in Wolverhampton city centre. It is seven years after closure, and no one has taken over the site.

  I bet there is a copy of Now That’s What I Call Music Vol. 23 in there somewhere.

  On cassette, obviously.

  Dodo Rating:

  Athena

  Athena epitomised the 1980s in the same way that the Raleigh Chopper summed up the 1970s. Its product range of reproduction art prints, calendars, and novelty items was perfect for the decade that style forgot, but with ’80s fashion and music making a determined comeback, is there time for Athena to stage a revival?

  It started out as an art shop in the early ’60s, but its most famous incarnation was born out of a corporate takeover and expansion programme that saw it grow to 60 stores nationwide.

  Classic Athena products included L’Enfant, a black and white photograph of a male model holding a small baby, and the iconic Tennis Girl poster (you know, the one with the bare arse).

  The company collapsed in 1995 and only survives through seven branches that managed to stay open following administration.

  Dodo Rating:

  Television Rental Shops

  In the early days of television, very few people actually bought one. They were bloody expensive. Instead, people rented them from electrical stores and chains such as Radio Rentals, Rediffusion, or Rumbelows (there must have been some law that meant they had to begin with the letter R). For a small amount each week you could have a brand-spanking-new Bush or Ferguson sitting in the corner of your living room on which you could watch the wrestling, or One Man and his Dog, perhaps. When your rental period expired, you could upgrade to a new model.

  Rental companies, who could also let you have anything from a fridge-freezer to a video recorder, experienced a massive slump in business in the 1990s when technology became cheaper and consumers, in the main, opted to buy their entertainment systems outright. It became very rare to see a rental shop on the high street.

  This was a real problem for many married men for whom a TV rental store window display was the only way to catch up on the football scores while out shopping with the wife on a Saturday afternoon.

  We may be about to come full circle, however. The speed at which televisual technology is advancing means that your £2,000 42” HD LCD monitor is pretty much out of date the moment you buy it. People are coming back round to the idea of shelling out a few quid a week in return for a cutting edge TV which they can exchange for a bigger, better, and newer one at the end of a year.

  Husbands, your weekend shopping trips may not be a trauma for much longer.

  Dodo Rating:

  Fish and Chips Wrapped in Newspaper

  Until the middle of the 1980s, anything you ordered from your local fish and chip shop would come wrapped in newspaper. The practice was outlawed by those party poopers at Health and Safety for fear that ingesting newsprint would be bad for our health.

  Now, I have a few things to say about that.

  Firstly, the fish and chips were never actually placed directly into newspaper. There was usually some sort of greaseproof lining or paper bag between the grub and the headlines, so it was very unlikely that any ink would get on the chips.

  And, even if it did, there is absolutely no research suggesting that it was bad for your health anyway.

  But my biggest issue is with the replacement. Instead of newspapers, we now have cardboard cones printed with fake newspaper headlines, or polystyrene trays, and they are both pants.

  And then there is the old saying, usually spoken by a politician or celebrity who has just taken a thumping from the press, that ‘today’s headlines are tomorrow’s chip wrappers’, which just doesn’t make sense any more, however true the sentiment may be.

  Dodo Rating:

  Keeping CDs Behind the Counter

  They were called masterbags. Cardboard sleeves that record stores kept behind the counter which held the popular CDs, tapes, and LPs of the time.

  The covers and cases were out on the shop floor. Empty.

  You, the customer, would select your copy of Stars by Simply Red on CD, or Circus by Erasure on cassette, take the case up to the counter, and the dodgy, looking bloke at the till would vanish amidst a network of shelves and cubby holes to locate the innards for you, quietly muttering to himself about your shite taste in music.

  I know, I was that dodgy-looking bloke.

  Working in record shops in the ’80s and ’90s meant a great deal of rooting around in a sea of masterbags to find the customer’s selection. This was usually a relatively simple process with most CDs, which were filed in alphabetical order by artist (ignoring any instances of The or A in the band name, unless the band name was The The, in which case you were best not ignoring it, to be honest). The name being written on the edge of the cardboard sleeve made it easy to flick through.

  It got more complicated when it came to cassettes or classical CDs, which were placed in order of price and catalogue number.

  Of course, any system like this relies on librarian-like discipline when it comes to the storage and filing of items. But these were shops managed and staffed by 20-something rock music fans. And teenage Saturday staff.

  Mistakes did happen.

  When you couldn’t find a particular item among the sea of cardboard, you would call upon one of your colleagues to help out. Some of these people had been working there for a while and knew their way around the musical alphabet, and often knew the classic misfiling – bands might have been misread as artist names, so Rolling Stones had ended up under S – but if that failed, then you had no option but to call out Dave from the stockroom.

  Dave was the bloke in charge of re-ordering the stock, and the man who wrote out all of the masterbags. These were his babies. He knew where they were. He didn’t, however, much like the idea of coming out onto the shop floor, so you called on him at your own risk. If you timed it for just after his 11am coffee then you were probably OK.

  Meanwhile, as all of this was going on, a huge queue was developing, with people eager to buy Adamski’s Killer on 12” single, or keen to return a defective copy of Woodface by Crowded House (‘I tried rewinding it with a pencil, but it wouldn’t work’).

  We now live in a time of security tags, and record stores happily leave the stock intact when it goes onto the shop floor. This reduces the time taken at the till, which would be fine if it wasn’t then used to try to get you to join the loyalty card scheme, or to buy a copy of the new Justin Bieber CD for only £3.99, seeing as you have already spent £20 (‘I’d rather have it inserted anally, thank you’).

  But that’s progress for you.

  Dodo Rating:

  Half-day Closing

  If you wanted to buy a loaf of bread after 1pm on a Wednesday where I grew up, you were buggered. The same would have been the case throughout the country. The day might differ from place to place, but everywhere had
its half-day closing. Pretty much every shop on the high street would be closed, with the exception of the post office. It would be proper tumbleweed territory come five past one.

  The reason for bringing down the shutters at lunchtime one day a week was pretty simple: shopkeepers worked Monday to Saturday with only Sunday off. At least, that was the case until pressure mounted, and legislation was brought in to give workers an additional half-day’s holiday each week. Some individual town and village councils had introduced the rule in the late 19th century, but it wasn’t until the Shops Act in 1911 that it became enshrined in law.

  Wednesday was usually the day set aside for early closing because it was conveniently located slap bang in the middle of the week. But this wasn’t the same everywhere, with Thursdays and Mondays often put to the same purpose. This could lead to great confusion when people were visiting from one town to another.

  Looking back now in our time of 24-hour shopping and the changes in Sunday trading laws, this whole half-day closing malarkey seems awfully quaint and Olde English, but it was fairly common right up until the mid-1980s. It created a haven of peace and quiet in the centre of every town in the country, and there was a lot to be said for that.

  Nowadays you won’t find any town, or even village, which observes half-day closing traditions, but you can still come across the odd shop here and there, often owned by elderly proprietors, who insist on closing at midday on a Wednesday. And long may they do so.

  Dodo Rating:

  Record Tokens

  If you are aged 40 or over, then there is a strong chance that somewhere in your house – at the bottom of the junk drawer, in an old shoebox under the bed, tucked away in the attic – there can still be found a record token.

  An unused, out-of-date, and now completely worthless record token.

  The principle was simple. Anyone could buy a record token from any music store and send it, using the free gift card it came with, to anyone else in the country. That person could then redeem the voucher in their own local record shop.

  Rather neat.

  The beauty of this system was that it enabled wizened old grannies with smelly hallways to give their unappreciative grandsons a birthday gift that was actually of some use. Rather than a pair of socks. Or a Ladybird book about reservoirs.