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Archive: asda

The failing economy of Kirkcaldy

5 August 2009 20:54

Categories: *, Current affairs, Economics, Famous Langtonians, Fife, General, Media, Newspapers, Personal, Politics, Scotland, Work

It was revealed yesterday that Gordon Brown will spend part of his summer doing voluntary work in Kirkcaldy, the town where he grew up which forms the major part of his constituency of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath. It is also my home town.

Some uncharitable people have suggested that his job may involve digging holes, something he has done quite enough of as Prime Minister. More cutting might be the observation that voluntary work is the only sort of work you’ll be able to find in Kirkcaldy.

A couple of weeks ago, The Times ran a piece about the economic woes which have hit Kirkcaldy which was a talking point among some of my friends. Aside from apparently inventing the demonym “Kirkcaldians” (I personally prefer “Langtonian”, named after the town’s old nickname, the Lang Toun), I think the article is largely a fair and accurate reflection of the town.

I have written before about the sorry state of the Mercat, the town’s main shopping centre which used to house my former workplace, Woolworths. Over the difficult Christmas period the Mercat went from bad to worse. But it gets just a passing mention in the Times piece, with its mere eight or more empty units.

Apparently there are thirty empty units in the High Street. There is a particularly dire section in the middle of the pedestrianised zone, where three shops in a row — which used to be the Link, Adams and Icon Clothing — now lie empty. What remains has been criticised for exhibiting the characteristics of a clone town (PDF link). Beyond that, particularly in the west end, what isn’t a chain store is most likely a pawn shop or a charity shop.

Perhaps this is not particularly unusual. The death of the High Street has been widely advertised, so this is not a problem unique to Kirkcaldy. The Times article briefly touches on the retail park. It sits on the north-western edge of the town, well away from the centre. But it is currently being expanded, a development which feels like a desperately-needed shot in the arm for Kirkcaldy.

The problem is that it just is not enough. Indeed, the clamour over the few new jobs that are available serve to bring into focus just how dire the situation is. I have lost count of the number of people that I know of applying for the same few jobs.

A new B&Q has opened, although the old one closed. A number of my former colleagues at Woolworths have ended up working there. PC World is another new store at the retail park. But so many people I know applied for jobs there. A friend who got an interview there was told that they had been bombarded with over 700 applications.

If you got rejected by PC World, you could always try applying for a job at the new Toys R Us. The only problem is that they apparently had 3,000 applications. Only a lucky 350 got an interview, with just 40 places going.

An Argos Extra has also opened up. They held an assessment day at the Jobcentre a couple of months ago. I saw it with my own eyes as I walked past it. There were two queues coming out of the Jobcentre, one in each direction. I have been told that the larger of the two queues stretched all the way to the police station, which sits at the opposite end of a street which is the best part of 200 yards long.

The store has been open for just over a week now. The good news on that front is that my friend, who transferred to work there from the existing High Street store, reports that sales have been very encouraging. Whether that is simply down to the excitement of something new opening in Kirkcaldy remains to be seen.

As for the Jobcentre itself, that continues to hire new people, including one of my friends. What they’ll do with the new staff when demand for the Jobecentre’s services is not so strong is unclear. But at the moment that feels like a distant possibility anyway. Whenever I went there I was often told they were short staffed.

In the Times article, there is a quote about the Jobcentre by a man called Tam Collins: “they expect you to stack shelves at Asda.” I got exactly that when I visited the Jobcentre. Going there is a fruitless task which I have now given up.

The Asda is a new store which has opened up in neighbouring Glenrothes. It is probably the most exciting thing in terms of employment to happen in Glenrothes for years. That is another place where a few of my former Woolworths colleagues have ended up. In a way they were lucky — Asda received over 7,000 applications for that one store.

Meanwhile, the town’s largest employer, a call centre called MGt, has recently shed 65 jobs as a result of the closure of Setanta. 65 looks like a small number compared to the amount that are already looking for work. But MGt has provided a lifeline to Kirkcaldy in terms of employment since it set up around a decade ago. Today it has around 1,000 people on its books. I dread to think what Kirkcaldy would be like if it wasn’t for MGt. That even MGt is downsizing is ominous.

But that sums up Kirkcaldy. It lost its way after the industrial decline of the previous fifty years. Now if you want a job in Kirkcaldy you need to either work in a call centre or in the precarious retail sector. And even then, good luck to you. After my previous experience of working in retail, I am avoiding it if at all possible.

Seven months since losing my job at Woolworths, and over a year since I graduated, I still haven’t found a full time job (although I’m lucky to have found bits and pieces of freelance work). I have well and truly hit the buffers, and I am now starting with a blank sheet of paper to decide on my next move.

One of my biggest mistakes was to focus my search too narrowly on a small geographical area. I certainly didn’t bet on finding a job in Kirkcaldy — it was bad enough before and clearly getting worse. But I planned on finding something in the eastern part of the central belt — somewhere within an area encompassing Fife, Dundee, Perth, Stirling or of course Edinburgh. No luck yet. I will have to broaden my search further and hope that something comes up, or hope that I will be able to rely on freelance work in the long term. I wouldn’t like to bet on relying on getting a job at a call centre in Kirkcaldy.

It is sad that Kirkcaldy is like this. This is the town of Adam Smith, the father of modern economics who looked out onto the bustling Firth of Forth, full of trade ships, and was thereby inspired to investigate sources of wealth. Today he would only be inspired to investigate the weed growth in the derelict former workplaces.

Sadder is the role of Gordon Brown. Surely, some people say, if there was one man who could save Kirkcaldy, it would be the Prime Minister and former Chancellor, who grew up here and depends on the residents’ votes. Some are truly furious about it.

Others, as the Times article notes, inexplicably give him and the government the benefit of the doubt. Talking to people, it is genuinely true that there are people in Kirkcaldy who believe that Gordon Brown is a competent leader who has somehow been stitched up. Even for failed leaders, the halo effect is still in evidence.

That is the irony. The people of Kirkcaldy are probably the one set of voters in the country that Gordon Brown can afford to take for granted. Could it be that having the local man as Prime Minister has exacerbated Kirkcaldy’s problems?

It would indeed be harsh to lay the blame wholly at Gordon Brown’s door. Kirkcaldy had problems before, and most of what has happened in the past year can be put down to the global recession.

But the Labour Party is supposed to look after the interests of people who live and work in towns just like Kirkcaldy — a former industrial town that slips ever-further into the mire, with one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. On the evidence I see with my own eyes, the Labour Party have failed us.

22 comments

Woolworths as it was known and loved, and neglected

7 January 2009 18:56

Categories: General, Nostalgia, Work

(Almost) 100 years of Woolworths

A series of posts

Woolworths: The curiously British US-based company
Woolworths as it was known and loved, and neglected
Woolworths: Childhood memories and adult gripes
It wasn’t just the credit crunch
The blunder of Woolworths
Identity crisis
The beginning of the end
The nasty side of human nature
Woolworths: Final thoughts and wrapping up
Woolworths rises from the ashes

In 1982, the British arm of Woolworths was separated from the American parent when it was bought by retail consortium Paternoster, later to become Kingfisher. It changed the direction of the company forever. According to the Woolworths Virtual Museum, BBC News reported on Woolworths being under British ownership for the first time against a backdrop of the Oxford Street store. Mere weeks later, that very store was closed down.

The Oxford Street store had never been profitable and the new owners sold it to take advantage of the fact that it was a very valuable piece of real estate. This set the scene for a swathe of store closures throughout the decade as Kingfisher sought to capitalise on Woolworths’ portfolio of valuable freehold properties.

When Kingfisher bought Woolworths in 1982, there were 955 stores in the UK. By the end of 1985, there were just 745. Every Woolco out of town store was closed. All 45 Shoppers World (an Argos-style catalogue shop) stores were closed. All of the overseas stores (Woolworths also owned stores in the Republic of Ireland, the West Indies, Cyprus and Zimbabwe) were closed.

What remained of Woolworths was experimented upon. A variety of different shop formats were trialled. One was Kidstore, focusing on goods aimed at children. Another store was bizarrely named Woolworths Weekend (worst marketing ever — why shop there during the week?), while another was The Woolworth Mall.

However, the Kingfisher years undoubtedly shaped Woolies into what we knew it as today. The pic ‘n’ mix offering was turned up to 11. Meanwhile, as well as streamlining the number of shops, Kingfisher streamlined the range of products into more or less the sort of range Woolworths was stocking up to 2008. Believe it or not, the intention was to prevent Woolies from becoming a “jack of all trades” so that it could focus on products that it particularly specialised in.

Meanwhile, experimentation with store formats continued. In the 1990s, Woolworths sought to re-enter towns it had recently left. As a cheap way of doing so, it set up stores in small units that focussed on a particular range. There was a Kids-at-Woolworths which focussed on Ladybird goods, an Entertainment-only shop and a newsagent-style Gifts & Sweets shop.

Subsequently, Kingfisher again appeared to neglect Woolworths. The Woolworths Virtual Museum bitterly notes, “Poor old Woolies, the goose that laid the golden egg for Kingfisher, was left aging in the corner throughout the 1990s – literally an asset to the Group.” This period of neglect is perhaps the root of the problems that eventually spelled the end for Woolworths.

In its day, Woolworth was an innovative store. The “five and dime” concept is one that lives on today in the form of pound shops. Arguably, one of the nails was driven into the company’s coffin by a shop using the Woolworths-invented single-price concept — Poundland (one of the few shops on the High Street that is in good shape at the moment).

Frank W. Woolworth also benefited from his strategy of stocking mass-produced, imported goods which helped drive down prices. Woolworth was also one of the first shops where customers were able to handle and select their goods without having to ask a sales assistant. (The move to self-service, however, was painfully slow, and was not fully completed until decimalisation forced Woolworths to purchase new till equipment anyway. Perhaps that was an early sign that Woolworths had become complacent and set in its ways.)

Woolworths was also, believe it or not, among the first stores to move out of town. In the 1960s it set up the Woolco out of town stores, based on an idea that originated in the USA’s side of the company. However, sceptical local authorities often refused planning permission, fearing that the move to out of town would facilitate the death of the High Street. Woolworths didn’t press on, which is why you didn’t actually see many out of town Woolworths stores.

Having closed all of the branches of Woolco down when it bought Woolworths, Kingfisher set about creating a new out of town store. Seeking to unite all of its British brands — Woolworths, B&Q, Comet and Superdrug — under one umbrella, it created Big W. It didn’t last long. The Woolworths Virtual Museum stingingly blasted:

The Big W format was the most successful prototype store ever launched by Kingfisher. But that has to be taken against a backdrop that their most successful brands – Woolworths, Comet, Superdrug, B&Q, Castorama and Darty were all created by someone else before being absorbed into Kingfisher. Big W was a first – born out of a need to justify Kingfisher’s identity.

Having failed to justify its identity, in 1999 Kingfisher pinned its hopes on a merger with Asda. Everything looked promising until Wal*mart came in and spoiled the party. In 2000, it was decided that the “general merchandise” sector of Kingfisher (comprised of Woolworths, Superdrug and MVC) would be demerged. Today, Kingfisher specialises in DIY rather than being made up of the eclectic jumble of retailers it consisted of in the 1990s.

Woolworths Group plc was formed in September 2001 — but not before Kingfisher had sold all of the Woolworths buildings, meaning that the new business had to lease all of them back from the new landlords. The saddest thing of all is that Woolworths still had huge takings — but it had ginormous rent bills.

The final words on the Woolworths Virtual Museum are rather incongruous.

With a new team at the top, and big ideas for the future, the Group is embarking on the next stage of their history. We look forward to reporting their success here in the Virtual Museum.

The final Woolworths stores in America closed in 1997. Remnants of the company live on though. The UK arm’s joint venture with BBC Worldwide, the DVD publishing house 2 entertain, is still in operation. Meanwhile, the American company still exists as Foot Locker, having decided to focus solely on sportswear in the 1990s.

Believe it or not, the last place in the world you’ll be able to shop in a bona fide Woolworth store is Germany. The company only separated from its American parent in 1997 when it became Foot Locker. But German Woolies appears to still be going strong.

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4 comments

Warning: This could be too convenient

2 May 2007 17:37

Categories: Current affairs, General

The Scotsman:

POWERFUL supermarkets are on the verge of becoming Britain’s “one-stop shop” by selling everything from football tickets to four-bedroom homes, experts have warned.

With bigger stores already having as many as 100,000 different product lines, it is only a matter of time before there is nothing “the silent, slightly guilty majority” of shoppers will not be able to get from the major chains, according to the trade magazine the Grocer.

And this is a bad thing?

Golf-driving nets, airline tickets, pet insurance and electricity supplies are among the unconventional items available in supermarkets such as Tesco, Sainsbury, Asda and Morrisons. Some offer discounts on Open University courses and children’s nurseries and are planning to have GP surgeries and community police services on sites.

It’s terrible, just terrible. I can’t possibly think why they haven’t banned supermarkets yet.

FFS.

4 comments

Asda gives young staff less opportunity

4 October 2006 14:55

Categories: Current affairs, Economics, Politics

Chris Dillow informs us how not to attack David Cameron.

I had a conversation today with my mother about the news that Asda will pay under-18s the same hourly wage as adults. She thought it was a good thing, but I said, “You do know what that means, don’t you? It just means they’ll employ fewer under-18s.”

That might be a bit cynical. But I’m pretty sure this is a fig leaf in the face of Wal-Mart’s increasingly bad publicity (an anti-Wal-Mart documentary is also doing the rounds among students at the moment). If they just raised the wages I would applaud them. But the fact that they have (presumably) gone out of their way to get this into the news makes me suspicious.

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