WH Smith name to disappear from high streets after sale

Good. Not for the workers obviously but I worked at a train station branch many years ago.

Price Gouging C*’s 

The airport and train station branches pay for the rest of the over priced stores.

I can remember, it started pouring down one day, so people popped in for an umbrella. 18 bloody quid. Don’t get me started on people whose phone chargers have broken or they’ve forgotten it. I did, against company policy allow some people to charge behind the till. They were very grateful.

Bastards!

It’s been circling the drain for years. The internet means it’s far cheaper to buy online and there’s a level of variety that WH Smiths can’t compete with.

I have absolutely no idea how they lasted as long as they did. Expected them to follow Woolworth’s

There was a time when smiths was fantastic. (About 25-30 years ago)

Then they stopped investing in stores, poorly managed stock centrally (follow this plan for your shelves, but we’re not giving you enough stock to do it), reduced manager freedom etc.

Then the real rot started, when they just started throwing every fucking idea under the sun into their stores. Post office? Sure, Model zone? Get in there. Toys R Us? Sure, we can squeeze you in? Tidy stores with fresh displays? Don’t take the piss now lads.

And don’t get me started on the shit on the tills. I counted once that I had 14 or so different things to push onto customers while selling them whatever they came in for. As well as scanning a voucher to give with their receipt.

Smith high street is failing because they can never figure out what their purpose is.

Are they changing the name to “Absolute Rip-off”?

I have no idea how they have been in business this long, except for the captive market airport and train station shops.

I was a child more than 60 years ago. At that time it was very different from the WH Smiths of the past 40 years – the product balance was different.

It was a magical place to me.

Crayons, pencils, pens, painting sets and painting paper. Not so many magazines and it was one of the few places in a small working class town that you could buy a few books. I, like most young boys of the 50s and 60s, used to get my relatives to buy me Iain Allen trainspotting books in there.

It started to go downhill not long after. Private Eye had a long running battle with it and called it WH Smug.

There is a minimal market for what it does now. Its demise is to be expected because they didn’t adapt well enough.

But those happy memories of mine regret its passing.

Just interested in what’s going to happen to post offices considering many of them became embedded in WHSmith stores

Amazed it lasted this long.

All the high street stores are so dreary

they were dead ages ago tbh. i used to love going in there as a kid in the 90s

Had the misfortune/luck (depending on your outlook on the ending of this post) at a train station at the end of January, accidentally spent 20 quid……..or so I thought.
The receipt shows the payment was accepted and the items paid for but over four weeks later they still haven’t taken the money from my account.

Never an airport though, we got 4 in every airport

I’m not really surprised.

Every WH Smith I’ve been in recently has not only been threadbare and filthy, but all their products seem to be dirty or damaged.

Plus the staff. I’m a retail worker so I genuinely, really do hate to bash other retail staff, but the workers in WH Smith are something else.

It’s like a kind of bad dream. You see them far away in the distance, but the closer you get to them, the further they move away before seemingly vanishing altogether. Barely any of them have any relevant product knowledge. I think many of them are even surprised to learn that they notionally have a job.

WH Smith could have probably saved itself if it had just downsized some of its town/city centre stores (because let’s face it, most WH Smith stores are just yawning chasms of discounted books, scuffed wood effect linoleum, and stained ceiling tiles), reduced its key product range by around half (nobody needs that much choice of Filofaxes), and reorganised itself around the idea of being a convenient professional stationers, like Staples but smaller and leaner.

WH Smith died a death of apathy and unsurity, never knowing what it wanted to be, and being ambivalent as to whether it achieved its aims or not.

Good. That’s what they get for not replacing my missing coverdisk in 1992. I knew if I just bided my time.

I only go into my local one because the post office is inside.

It seems few commenting knows the details (not helped by pay walls). Sunmary:

WH Smith brand will remian in airports and train stations. You lament high prices, but that’s staying the same. 

They’re offloading the high street stores. They won’t get to keep the name. Their high street business is profitable. Hence numerous bidders.

How any new owner will change the high street stores we’ll have to wait and see. They desperately need investment and I’m sure owners will want to revamp them.

I’m honestly gutted about this. I was in my local one today which has a good selection of things to look at. But that’s the problem, items I saw and then wanted to buy were overpriced so I didn’t feel like buying and the things I went for were out of stock. It’s a very random shop that probably sells too range a wide of things at inflated prices. I’ve never once seen someone buying the large chocolate, or the games section that gathers dust at the back.

I’ll miss it, but I’ll miss what it was around 20 years ago.

There’s only so many overpriced cards and overpriced art supplies you can buy. 

Overpriced goods and dated stores…haven’t stepped into one since my kids bought a new pencil case in year 6…20 odd years ago. Bloody expensive back then.

I misread that as Will Smith and was momentarily very pleased, and a bit confused at how such a deal could be orchestrated.

When a singular Freddo is £1 from there, can’t say I’m surprised

Will the new owners still have to offer the trademark “Sticky, torn, carpets brightened up with safety duct tape?”

Also the £1 Chocolate Oranges at the end of their “Best Before Dates” are a guilty pleasure.

Shocked it took this long. The high street model has been making less and less money every year for a long time. I used to be a manager there and they gave up a long time ago. They’d push money into shite that we didn’t need, tablets, store mobile phones etc while at the same time absolutely refusing to invest in what we did need. When nobody used the new technology because it slowed workload massively, they started forcing us by tracking how often we’d use them, then they’d wonder why everything was taking forever to get done. We’d tell them that the tablets and phones were a hindrance, and all we’d get back was “No they’re not! They’re incredible!” Why would we want to carry around 2 pieces of paper with a planogram on it when we could carry a huge, bulky, slow to respond tablet that you’d have to constantly zoom in and out to actually read anything?

When I last worked there in 2022, some PCs still ran on Windows XP. The scanners that we’d use for 90% of tasks were so old that they no longer could be fixed. The new ones were reliant on Bluetooth and WiFi which would CONSTANTLY cut out when trying to do anything. The shelving units were so old and battered I would have to bend the metal myself to actually get them to fit. They stopped caring and it showed. Walking into one of those stores now feels like walking into an alternate universe where vibrance, energy and joy ceases to exist.

The final nail for me was when they changed the management system after covid. Every manager, assistant manager and supervisor was put at risk of redundancy. They introduced a new job role. “Cluster Manager.” Where instead of managing just one store, you got 4 or 5. For less money! They expected everybody to clamour for these jobs but so many of the managers had been there for 20+ years, saw the chance for a nice payout and bailed. That job was hell, they sold a good story about how they’d planned it all through but when the time came it was radio silence and we had to figure everything out for ourselves. Btw, this change happened in mid-November. You know, building up to the busiest time of year for retail. So many people left including me. Instead of filling those jobs, they just passed the stores around to the poor buggers who were left. I know of one manager who had 12 stores at one point. Luckily I was still eligible for my redundancy payout when I left. I was told it would get better, stick it out, you’re making a mistake. 2 months later that same colleague told me I made the right choice and they wish they left when I did. Poor bloke used to live and breathe that job, now he hates it and has lost all passion for it. I hope he gets the payout that he deserved 4 years ago very soon.