When Are You Closing?

Last Thursday at Sports World, a customer asked Amanda a question: When are you closing? She assumed that he was asking about that night, as Thursday late-night shopping is common in Exeter, and told him 9 pm. He said, "No, I mean closing permanently; you went into receivership, and you, Woolworths, and JJB Sports are all closing." This was news to Amanda, and so she did some checking, and it turns out that Woolworths and JJB Sports are closing. Sports World is owned by Sports Direct, a different company (which happens to own the distribution licenses for the No Fear brand in most of the world, but not the U.S.).

Receivership, incidentally, is similar to bankruptcy. The Exeter Woolworths is closing; Amanda and I were there yesterday morning, and it was not a pretty sight. It had been about a month since I had been to Woolworths, and the last time I was there, it looked like a normal store. This time, something was clearly going on. There were many empty shelves, probably a little over half of the shelves in the store. Most of the items that were left in the store were on a significant discount, the smaller ones were around 20%. I picked up a lamp for about £2, and the bulbs for it for another 50p or so. It's very sad to see Woolworths going under; they had the best collection of decent, inexpensive goods that we'd managed to find in town. With them gone, we'll be left with Marks & Spencer, which is considerably more expensive in general (from comparison of a few household items after we first arrived, from 50-100% more expensive), and the charity shops, which were even cheaper than Woolworths, although their selection is generally very limited.

When looking for a particular item in the charity shops, you can expect to be looking for several weeks before it turns up. For example, I searched for a coat for about two months in the charity shops, but never found anything in my size that was even close to what I was looking for. At Marks & Spencer, I found a couple of coats right away, but they cost well over £100. At another shop in town that has a more limited focus than Marks & Spencer, I happened to catch a good sale and find a coat that was almost exactly what I was looking for, at a cost of less than £50.

 

JJB Sports, incidentally, tended to be a pretty expensive sporting goods store. Amanda and I went by one night, and never managed to find anything that we hadn't seen cheaper someplace else (most often at Sports World). As far as we're concerned, it won't be missed.