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.