In one of my articles, I wrote about the poster that appeared in the staff area this time last year. It announced:

Remember Remember the 5th of November!

In just less than a year, on the 5th November 2009, we celebrate our 100th birthday!

Watch out for more details coming soon…

Unfortunately we didn’t get many more details about the centenary celebrations. All we heard after that was stuff about trying to sell the company for a pound.

I regret not taking the poster to keep as soon as it was clear that Woolies would not emerge from the mire it found itself in through late November and December. Someone is selling one of these posters on eBay at the moment. The poster is a great piece of history — the 100th birthday that never was.

Or was it? Today, the new owners of the Woolworths brand have been celebrating the centenary nonetheless by putting on 100 promotions and giving away free Pic ‘n’ Mix with every order. That is what I like about the new Woolworths, owned by Shop Direct. Despite being a separate company, they are respectful of the name’s heritage. In fairness, they would be mad not to — the Woolies name must still have appeal, especially among those in a nostalgic mood.

Not everyone is so happy about it. The Woolworths Facebook page is often full of offended comments from people who feel that it is presumptuous and opportunistic of Shop Direct to cash in on the 99 years of Woolworths that preceded their involvement. There were, after all, around 30,000 workers made redundant at the original Woolworths last Christmas. Most probably aren’t in the mood to celebrate.

It is a matter of debate whether Woolworths is 100 really. Today is nothing other than the 100th anniversary of the first F. W. Woolworth store to open in the UK. The company had already been operating in the USA and Canada for decades before that. The UK company became separate in the 1980s when it was bought by Kingfisher. After that, Woolworths in the UK became a separate company when Kingfisher cast it off in 2001.

In the USA, the Woolworths name ceased to exist in 1997. But the original company still exists as Foot Locker, having decided to concentrate on sports goods. If the operation in the USA still counts, Woolworths is 131 years old.

You can still shop in bona fide Woolworths stores in Germany. These, like the British stores, were originally part of the American company and became separate in 1998. It declared insolvency this year, but struggles on.

(Supermarket chains named Woolworths in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa have nothing to do with the original FW Woolworth apart from the name.)

(Almost) 100 years of Woolworths

A series of posts

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

Today, the shutter came down for the final time at Woolworths Kirkcaldy, Store 1201. It was among the final group of branches to close. It is the end of an era. This institution had been a fixture in Britain’s High Streets for almost 100 years.

The history of the original company set up by Frank W. Woolworth goes back even further though. Even though some of the online campaigns to save Woolies laboured under the impression that it was a British store, Mr Woolworth was in fact from the USA and he opened several stores in the USA and Canada before opening a single British branch. And right up until the 1980s, Woolies in the UK sent most of its (substantial) profits back to the USA as well!

According to the Woolworths Virtual Museum website (which was taken down when the company went into administration, but can still be viewed on the internet archive), the origins of the store can be traced right back to 1873. Frank Woolworth worked for William Moore at the Augsbury and Moore Dry Goods Store in Watertown, New York. Mr. Moore came up with the innovation to sell surplus goods at a fixed price of 5 cents.

Mr. Woolworth took this idea further, deciding to set up an entire shop full of goods that cost 5 cents. Having persuaded Mr. Moore to back the store, the first Woolworths shop opened in Utica, New York in 1978. But after an initial success, the store was eventually a flop. Undeterred, Mr. Woolworth opened a second store in Pennsylvania, 60 miles away. It was a runaway success.

From then on, there was no stopping Woolworth. By 1910, F. W. Woolworth paid for the construction of the Woolworth Building — which was the world’s tallest building until 1930 — with $15 million in cash. As well as expanding into the UK, Woolworths also opened branches in Canada, Germany, Ireland and Cuba! (Retailers named Woolworths in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Mexico have nothing to do with F. W. Woolworth’s company.)

It was only in 1909, over 30 years after the opening of the first Woolworth store in the USA, that the brand arrived in Britain. Anglophile Frank W. Woolworth had written several years earlier during a visit to the UK, “I believe that a good penny and sixpence store, run by a live Yankee, would be a sensation here.” The first British F. W. Woolworth & Co. Ltd 3^d and 6^d store was opened on 5 November 1909 on Church Street in Liverpool. It was a roaring success.

Before long, Woolworths had become bigger in the UK than it was in the USA. It was quickly given the nickname Woolies, a sign of the genuine affection the British public had for the store. By the 1920s, a new Woolworths store was being opened every 17 days. Local officials across the country were desperate for a Woolies to open in their town, and if it did so it was seen as a seal of approval for the area. The British image of the chain was further underlined when the company raised enough money to buy two Spitfires during World War II.

Woolworths dropped the fixed price concept during World War II. The 6^d upper limit had been stretched to breaking point during the 1930s as Woolies started selling socks and shoes individually for sixpence. And if you wanted a saucepan, you had to buy the lid separately too! As rationing came in, the 6^d upper limit had to go.

After the war, Woolies grew even more quickly than before. Alongside the programme re-opening stores affected by the events of World War II, 330 new stores were opened within a six year period in the 1950s. At one point, stores were opening at the rate of two per week. The 1,000th Woolworths store in Britain was opened in Portslade in 1956.

Decline set in during the 1970s. Analysts began to criticise the “moribund” store. Throughout that decade, around 150 stores were closed, bringing the number of stores back down from a peak of 1,100.

Woolworths had lots of freehold properties and sold some in order to buy DIY chains B&Q and Dodge City. Analysts were sceptical, but Woolworths Chairman Geoffrey Rogers was right in his hunch that DIY would be a growth area in the coming decade. Mr. Rogers had envisaged 100 B&Q stores opening within ten years. The target was easily surpassed.

Woolworths had much to celebrate after its first seventy years. But that was all plain sailing compared to what would face the company from the 1980s onwards. My next post will look at the history of Woolworths from the Kingfisher purchase onwards.

Let’s look at the list as laid out by Jeff.

• Raise the limit for purchasing alcohol in off-licenses to 21

  Well right away this is about as populist as policies get. Blame it on the yoof. The media loves to do it, and the politicians love to throw around these age limits. They get to look “tough” by passing some draconian legislation that adversely affects someone. And who better to do this to than the youth, who do not vote in high numbers because they are already so disenchanted? SNP wins by looking tough without losing any votes.

  Besides that, what is this age limit supposed to achieve? We all know that these age limits are about as workable as a chocolate kettle. Given that there is currently an age limit of 18 and under-18s still find it easy enough to get their hands on alcohol, what makes anyone think that raising the limit by a few years will improve the situation any?

  There is nothing to suggest that raising that limit to 21 will make it any more difficult for rowdy youths to get their hands on alcohol. And why should perfectly law-abiding 18-20 year olds who intend to drink alcohol responsibly be prohibited from doing so?

  The fact is that those youths who really want to get alcohol will just nick it from their dad’s cabinet. Or their friend’s dad’s cabinet. Or their uncle’s cabinet. Or anywhere they can get it from. That is assuming they haven’t just got someone else who is above 21 to buy it for them, as Scottish Tory Boy points out.

  Congratulations SNP — you have made it almost impossible for law-abiding drinkers to get their hands on alcohol, whereas the rowdy contingent are encouraged into behaving even more rowdily.

  And if you want people to act like adults, it’s probably not the best idea to treat them like kids.

• Reprice drinks to a minimum of 35p per unit of alcohol

  You want a continental “café-style” drinking culture? Then raising the price of alcohol is the last thing you should do.

  Why is that then? Well, increasing the price of alcohol will mean it will make little sense to just have one or two drinks with a meal. It will be too expensive for little return. If alcohol costs three or four times more than coffee, no-one will drink it like coffee. Instead, people will use alcohol by saving up their money for a big night out. The result? More binge drinking.

  Jeff says that the SNP’s policies are remarkably similar to those of Sweden. He is correct. Jeff also says that “I can easily imagine [they] don’t have the same alcohol-dependency and vandal culture that we have here.” Unfortunately, Jeff hasn’t done his research because Scandinavia — where alcohol is much more expensive than it is here — has a notorious binge drinking problem.

  Nor is the USA exactly a haven of responsible drinking. Has he never heard of the American phenomenon of “spring break”? These North American events are legendary for their excessive binge drinking and rowdy behaviour. Nor do I think of Australia as one of the most sober nations in the world!

  Clearly, simply raising the price of alcohol won’t encourage people to stop binge drinking. In fact, if anything, it will have the opposite effect.

• Have dedicated [alcohol] checkouts in some of the larger supermarkets

  I’m not exactly sure what this idea is supposed to achieve. Jeff says it is to create an “inconvenience of having to go for a separate checkout to buy alcohol.” But what does it mean? Walking a few yards? If people will have already travel all the way to the supermarket, having them walk to a different checkout is hardly going to put anyone off.

  And think about the scenario. You’ve got some irresponsible people who only go to the supermarket to buy some bottles. They just go to the alcohol checkout, pay for their goods and then saunter off to the park to cause some fuss. Then you’ve got the responsible drinkers who want to enjoy a few glasses with their meals. These people are genuinely inconvenienced, as they have to go to the checkout twice — once to pay for their food, and another time to pay for their alcohol.

  Yet again, the responsible drinkers are punished whereas the troublemakers hardly bat an eyelid. Yet another sloppy policy.

• Increase of financial support for alcohol prevention, treatment and support services

  No complaints here. This seems sensible enough to me.

This is not to say that there is not a problem with irresponsible binge-drinking and rowdy neds in the streets. Jeff rightly notes that Scotland has a problem and it’s not good enough just to sit there and let it continue. The point is that these measures will do absolutely nothing to curb binge drinking. If anything, they will exacerbate the problems while making life difficult for the majority who drink sensibly.

Unfortunately — as we see from governments of all shades time and again — the temptation for a government faced with a problem is just to do something, anything. Preferably sounding tough. Then declare the problem solved. No matter whether the solution is well thought-through or planned out.

This isn’t the first time the Montreal surface has caused problems — but this year it came earlier. The organisers blamed this year’s problems on the evolution of the cars. But that is a poor excuse. Every year the track breaks up more and more, so the organisers should be prepared for this eventuality every year. If they can’t lay tarmac that can cope with what an F1 car will give it, they shouldn’t be holding an F1 Grand Prix.

Another point, as noted by Keith at F1Fanatic last week, is that F1 is beginning to look too fast for the tight confines of the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve. Of course, Canada isn’t the only race to be held on a street circuit — Monaco being the obvious example.

However, the Circuit de Monaco is the slowest on the calendar so the likelihood of a Robert Kubica-style horror-smash is pretty low. Meanwhile, the Albert Park circuit has plenty of space for run-off areas, gravel traps and the like.

Canada has the close, punishing walls of Monaco with the dizzying speeds of Monza. So when a car leaves the track, it can spell disaster, just as it did with Robert Kubica last year.

Another problem with the Montreal circuit is the tight space requirements. The whole circuit is built on a man-made island. As such, there is little scope for altering the circuit or increasing the run-off areas. The best the organisers could do to mitigate against another Kubica-style crash in the run-up to the hairpin was to move the wall forward in an attempt to change the angle of impact. Is that enough for today’s safety-conscious F1 standards?

In part, it is these characteristics that make the Canadian Grand Prix such an exciting event year-in, year-out. There is so much history at the circuit as well. Not many circuits stay on the calendar for 30 years running. Today the Canadian Grand Prix is significant as the only F1 event in North America, and one of just two in the Americas as a whole.

But no-one likes to see a driver involved in a big accident. It could have been so much worse for Robert Kubica who escaped uninjured, but whose feet were sticking out of the monocoque by the time the wreck came to a stand-still.

If the circuit cannot improve its standards in terms of safety and tarmac break-up, it has to be concluded that F1 has now outgrown the narrow confines of the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve. If the Canadian Grand Prix had to be dropped, it would be the ideal time to bring back the United States Grand Prix — an event that is conspicuous by its absence from the F1 calendar.

For several months now the old Scrabulous saga has been playing out. Some smart guys thought it would be a great idea to be able to play Scrabble with your friends on Facebook. They were right. It became Facebook’s most popular application, and could even count Mark Zuckerberg among its users.

Unfortunately, the creators of Scrabulous didn’t own the intellectual property to the game. The people who do own the IP, Hasbro and Mattel, have gone on the assault. They are suing Scrabulous’s creators Rajat Agarwall and Jayant Agarwall. This is despite the fact that the brothers have undoubtedly done more than anyone else in recent years to raise the profile of Scrabble.

Do you think if Hasbro and / or Mattel had created a Facebook Application for Scrabble it would have been as successful as Scrabulous? I, for one, highly doubt it. Their reaction alone has demonstrated that they simply don’t “get” the internet. Just like the recorded music industry before them, board game companies, it seems, have woken up to find that the internet has eaten away at their old fashioned business model. They don’t know how to capitalise on the internet. It needn’t necessarily be a threat. But their head-in-the-sand behaviour ensures that it will be.

My personal pet theory is that old companies got far too cosy in the 20th century ways. With the intellectual property rights wrapped up, they have seen no need to innovate. They have rested on their laurels. As such, their products have stagnated. Remember, the optimal length of copyright is around 15 years. A similar length will apply to intellectual property. Scrabble can trace its history back to four times that length.

As was pointed out on the Freakonomics blog earlier this year, Mattel’s and Hasbro’s plans for the future of Scrabble are pretty lame to say the least.

The plans include adding anniversary labels to Scrabble packaging and introducing a folding edition of the deluxe Scrabble board.

In the meantime, the best thing to happen to Scrabble in generations is being targeted by Hasbro and Mattel simply because they were not smart enough to come up with the idea in the first place. They should have applauded and endorsed Scrabulous. That way, they would have ended up with a hell of a lot more respect and almost certainly more sales than under the current strategy of the companies.

In the latest stage of their assault, Mattel have finally launched their own ‘official’ Scrabble Facebook Application. But The Guardian reports that all is not well. And yet again, the problem can be laid at the door of intellectual property rights.

Seemingly, the new ‘official’ application is only endorsed by Mattel — not Hasbro. This means that you can not play Scrabble in the USA or Canada, where Hasbro own the rights. For this reason alone, the trust of Facebook’s users has been lost. If you can’t even play against your friends just because they happen to live in North America, why would you bother defecting from Scrabulous which currently has approximately 700,000 “daily active users”?

Today another Facebook Application has been hit by a similar corporate strangling. This time it is from a company that you would think would be able to cope with new technologies better.

Tetris Tournament was an early Facebook hit, and one of my favourite Facebook apps. It didn’t take long for its name to change to BlockStar, but it was still clearly derived from Tetris. The game itself was a bit clunky, but it did the job and was good fun.

Today it has become “Tetris Friends (formerly Block Star)“. Yes, it is now an official Tetris app. So, is this simply BlockStar with a shiny Tetris logo over the top? Far from it. The new game is utter, utter shit. Amazing when you consider that it is actually the official Tetris game. The original is a classic. This is a big pile of flaming hairy balls.

For one thing, the game now only lasts a maximum of two minutes. That’s right. No new levels. No game over as you reach the top. Just a high score after two minutes. It is ready to finish just when you get into the groove. Meanwhile, the graphics are cluttered and confusing. This game is intensely unsatisfying.

The reviews agree. The application’s wall has become a stream of obscenities while the reviews section has turned into a mere succession of one-star ratings.

In this respect, the users of Scrabulous have got off very lightly indeed. The best Tetris app on Facebook has been mauled out of all recognition.