High Street chain collapse sweepstake

barcode
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Joined: Wed 29 Aug, 2007 19.36

Which Topshops/mans are for the chop?
JAS84
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Joined: Fri 12 Aug, 2011 10.23
Location: Hull, UK

Yorkshire Linen Co has closed down.
https://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/news/bu ... ll-2976077
JAS84
Posts: 585
Joined: Fri 12 Aug, 2011 10.23
Location: Hull, UK

So much for the reprieve. Hull House of Fraser is closing after all.
https://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/news/hu ... re-2980908
steveboswell
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Location: Sheffield
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Bathstore the latest chain to face trouble, according to this article from Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... es-at-risk
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WillPS
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JAS84 wrote: Fri 14 Jun, 2019 17.33 So much for the reprieve. Hull House of Fraser is closing after all.
https://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/news/hu ... re-2980908
Interesting, but not surprising sadly.

I went around the shops in Birmingham yesterday for the first time in a while. I went to that new Primark which everyone talks about, it was a special kind of hell all of its own, but clearly it had a buzz about it and if it wasn't so busy it would have been easy to see why people were happy to shop there.

Two minutes walk away, I went in to the House of Fraser store. Despite it being so close, and the fact i'd been in Birmingham dozens of times in the last few years, I had never even been to the bit where House of Fraser is, which tells its own story. What I found was a rather splendid building with lots of lovely original features but so few customers that you could be forgiven for thinking there was a metre of snow outside.

The very first thing you see upon entering is an escalator heading to the basement which has a sign up advising the floor is now closed. The fifth and sixth floors are also closed; apparently this has all happened in the last year. Despite that the stock across the remaining 4 floors was still quite sparse. Eventually I found something I might be interested in - decent kitchenware, but alas the La Creuset range was laughably small and spread very *very* thin over a huge display; probably an area double the size of a McArthur Glen La Creuset outlet store but with less than a quarter of their range. The Joseph Joseph range was better but didn't have the 2 or 3 fancy single purpose items I'd considered buying before.

A sure sign of a failing department store is a Clearance Area still flogging imperfect Christmas decorations at only ~50% off in June. A rather sad corner of the same floor had exactly that, along with a few ex-display old fashioned divan beds, all that remains of a once much larger home furnishings department.

The downwards escalator was broken, so I headed to the lift area. Once again I found some reminders of what a lovely store this once was, dividers making a clear area around the lifts so you had plenty of room to wait and a plaque on the wall above the controls advising that the lifts were automatic and how one should go about using them. An off brand sign advised 1 lift was out of order, but all the floor indicators were dead so you really had no way of knowing if they all might be. I was about to give up when a guy came over and said 'there's only 1 or 2, but it shouldn't be long'.

The rest of the store seemed to be a very awkward juxtaposition between rails of clearance clothing TK Maxx style, stacks of Sports Direct tat and mid-to-high end designer concessions, all with very little in the way of store-design to bring them together in any way. Oh, and a wig-making department, tucked away behind sportswear clearance (obvz!).

God alone knows how Mike Ashley or anyone else might think this shop has a future in anything approaching its current form.
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JAS84
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Location: Hull, UK

That certainly explains why the Debenhams board would rather take the chain into administration than let Ashley have it!
Martin Phillp
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Joined: Wed 11 May, 2011 01.28

Every time I walk through the Croydon Village Outlet, formerly an Allders, you can see how great it was as a four floor department store. All that they use is the ground floor these days, which is full of independent small scale retailers. The lift still worked in 2012 however.



The saving grace is that when building work eventually starts at the Whitgift Centre for Westfield, the site will become a John Lewis.
TVF's London Lite.
g67bbx
Posts: 59
Joined: Sat 06 Jan, 2018 08.18

Things are not going well for Superdry

Over an £85m loss (after tax) in last Financial Year.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/busines ... ar-AAE7ylX
thegeek
Posts: 858
Joined: Sat 04 Jun, 2005 12.35

Here's another 'collapse as in roof collapse' kind of post.

On Monday, while The Mall's PR team were tweeting this:


Here's what the 'earlier incident' was looking like:


It took some 24 hours to get the fire under control, and at least half of the mall (including a Poundland, JD, Deichmann, a phone shop or two, and possibly Boots and Asda) will be toast or at least very soggy.

There are plans - quite controversial locally - to redevelop the mall and build lots of flats on top of it, so we might see no attempts to rebuild the fire-damaged bit until the development is approved by the council.
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WillPS
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thegeek wrote: Wed 24 Jul, 2019 06.40 There are plans - quite controversial locally - to redevelop the mall and build lots of flats on top of it, so we might see no attempts to rebuild the fire-damaged bit until the development is approved by the council.
Come to Nottingham and see for yourself why that's such a bad idea. Horrific out of date shopping centre structure which can't be reset because there is a tower of people's homes on top of it.
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Whataday
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g67bbx wrote: Wed 10 Jul, 2019 11.42 Things are not going well for Superdry

Over an £85m loss (after tax) in last Financial Year.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/busines ... ar-AAE7ylX
They've really gone out of fashion now. I haven't seen anyone wearing Superdry for years.
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