Somewhere in a head office design folder, in the autumn of 2008, there was a logo that nobody would ever use. The marketing team had drawn it up well in advance, because these things take planning. It was for November 2009. One hundred years of trading in Britain. A centenary, with parties in the stores and a commemorative range and a hundred candles on the biggest cake the confectionery buyers could arrange. On 6 January 2009, the last 199 Woolworths shops in Britain closed their doors for the final time. The chain missed its own hundredth birthday by eleven months.

Eight hundred and seven stores. Twenty-seven thousand people out of work. From the first public confirmation that something was wrong to the last till closing was a matter of weeks. And here is the part that has never quite made sense to anyone who lived through it: Woolworths was not unloved. It was not a business that customers had quietly abandoned. In the final days, when the closing-down signs went up, the shops were rammed. People queued. People wept in the aisles. More than five thousand members of the public rang the company to ask, apparently seriously, whether they could buy it themselves, because they had read in the papers that somebody was trying to purchase the entire chain for one pound.

#Woolworths #BritishHistory #RetailHistory