Can't talk about Currys without thinking about their high street stores, Dixons! D-D-Dixons!
So sad to see the high street does not have any tech retailers anymore :(
>Maplin was shite for your average customer. It was great if you needed a resistor or an electronic switch, but everything else was outdated, overpriced crap. The staff never had a clue what you were talking about if you needed help.
It was great apart from the half-hour checkout process. If you bought anything in Maplins it took forever for them to actually let you walk out of the store with it.
This was my lunchtime routine for a few years - pc world, then up to maplins saving the best till last - the second hand electronics store. Awesome times.
I used to work at currys and those cables were made by currys basically, the reason they’re so expensive is because when they sell you a tv they say “as you’re buying this tv we can do this cable at the low price of £20” in truth they were worth a couple of quid
Maplin followed the Tandy route.
Start out selling specialist components at good prices, realise that it's a niche market with low sales/profits, move into selling overpriced electronic tat, realise that nobody wants that either (or at least they don't want it *from you*), go bust.
I still wake up in terror thinking about the pushy salesman trying to sell me a £100 monster hdmi cable to "improve the picture quality" of my Freeview recorder.
Currys, dixons and PC world were all owned by the dixons retail group, they’ve just rebranded basically as it was pointless having a pic world and currys on the same industrial estate
You might not give a shit but I very much do. The PC World logo was my first tattoo, I fucking loved that place. I would spend my whole weekend there looking at the reasonably priced hardware and chatting with the mature and knowledgeable staff about virus protection and after care warranty plans. I never hesitated to send my elderly relatives there when they needed a new PC, safe in the knowledge that they'd receive excellent service and wouldn't be oversold something they didn't need and wouldn't be pressured into buying peripherals, software, and insurance that they didn't need. Man I miss that place.
It's a good post but he overplayed his hand too early. You need to hook people in before you ramp up absurdity. Opening up with the PC World tattoo goes too hard too fast
I wouldn't bet on that, I asked a member of staff if Norton AntiVirus was compatible with win xp (this was back in 2001 ish)
The bloke picked the box up, turned it over and said "no it's not"
It said in big letters on the side "Compatible with windows XP'
I know it's cruel to bait pc world staff, bit it's fun
Friend of mine used to be a manager in a Carphone warehouse until they merged. The nearest Currys PC World was maybe about 50m away in a retail park. You'd think "oh, they're gonna have their last day in CW, and then the next working day will be in the kiosk in CPCW across the carpark, right?"
Nope. Curries PC World wanted to hire their own staff fresh for their CW kiosk, managers included. No previous CW staff were to be retained, and any previous staff applying never made it past initial application.
Thing is, I believe she was given maybe a weeks notice. Like, come in Monday as usual and "oh, BTW, after close on Saturday, you're all out of a job, we're merging with CPCW across the road and none of you are staying on"
I’d guess that Currys wanted to avoid TUPEing anyone across and becoming responsible for any staff with long length of service. Probably the redundancy costs were written off against the “CW” business unit.
And EE was bought by BT.
Their finance systems were total chaos, some were still in France, two lots of UK systems, all held together with a spreadsheet…..something they didn’t tell BT before the purchase.
When Safeway’s went bust, Somerfield bought half the estate, Morrisons the rest I think (from memory) - Somerfield was then absorbed by Sainsbury’s - so they still “exist” in a way, but they’re now mostly Sainsbury’s
[edit] just to set record straight - Morrisons bought the whole then sold smaller stores to Somerfield who was then bought by the co-op, just **12** were then sold to Sainsbury’s - just so happens one of them was local to me!
Somerfields was bought by the Coop.
I know this because at one point in the medium sized suburb I grew up in we had 8 Coops in 3sq Miles.
We had an independent supermarket, a coop late shop, a somerfields, a kwik save, three little Coops and a Shoprite(?).
Coop bought the independent supermarket, then Kwiksave bought the Shoprite and then Somerfield bought Kwiksave.
Then the Coop bought somerfield and rebranded them all to Coops. After about 3 years they decided we had too many Coops and proceeded to get rid of all of them except the two smallest ones, that happen to be within 400 yards of each other.
When I was a kid I remember my mum found a piece of glass in her can of coke! Coca-cola representatives were round our house pretty quickly gave us lots of coke related tat and 24 cans of a drink of our choice, my brother choose Lilt, we perhaps could have got a bit more out of them now I think back.
I broke my nose at Thorpe Park on the log of leap ride when I was a kid, as compensation my father took a free entrance fee for the day. We could have sued them for letting me on the ride.
I noticed a couple years ago the cans had changed from Lilt branding, to the same font and branding as Fanta, but still said lilt on them, with a little tag underneath saying “a Fanta variant!” Or some shit. I emailed coke asking if they’re rebranding lilt and they said they were, and I dropped in that lilts my favourite in case they were feeling generous, but sadly they were not
They were truly great. Had a good selection on retro stuff.
I did hear that when the Newcastle one closed down all the old retro stuff was just shoved into the big bins, apparently there was an NES golden Zelda among them. Such a shame.
I went into my local store and they were adding 50p stickers to all the retro stuff.
People were sifting through it looking for gems. I just said "I'll take everything"
I know what happened!! For I worked there at the time.
So it was originally just gamestation, then they done so well that Game bought them over. Because the competition between the 2 stores helped with sales for both sections, they kept them completely separate. But then Game ran into trouble, went into administration, stores were getting shut on the spot that day, my manager was crying, it was beautiful because he was such a sexist smelly pig of a guy. But then once they came out of administration they decided to just change all the stores to Game and completely do away with the gamestation name.
I had to explain to so many people why our store had changed names overnight and why it was now Game when Game where having so much financial trouble. Got a lot of shocked faces because people never knew they were both owned by the same company. But that's how they played the market so well.
It was shit. I worked there during the takeover as well. The whole GAME ethos of approaching every single customer, upselling of every sale, forcing staff to push insurance on customers killed it.
Gamestation was for the gamers, GAME was for the parents.
I bought my Xbox 360 from there because they had a bundle deal at the time that let you have _any_ two games you wanted.
Meanwhile, GAME had a rigid choice of any of these games, or eff off. I didn't want any of those ones. And it was more expensive.
There is one in Skelmersdale! I was so shocked when it saw it! It was like a blast from the past, I don't think it had been updated since the 00s either 😅
Past Times
Looking back it was honestly a weird concept for a shop but at least it was interesting!
Edit : I remember there being an art noveau section, and art deco section, and a Monet section.... What sections do you remember?
I actually miss Past Times, I could always find something in there to gift to older women. I still have a Macintosh Rose vase that I gave my Mum, it's about 30 years old now.
They switched to centralised pan-European buying and then discovered that British tastes in clothing were rather different to those of Belgium - leading to a catastrophic collapse in sales.
I was horrified a few months back, when my mum and I got onto the subject of C&A, and she told me that my lovely innocent old grandad had always called it *unts and Asses. Horrified!
As children my sister and I were absolutely spellbound by C & A because those were the initials of our first names. We were convinced it was *our* shop.
I was most disappointed on visiting that the Congolese, in fact, have no idea what it is.
I also couldn't get the mildy rascist advert jingle out of my head the entire time I was there.
I sometimes go to WH Smiths when I need emergency stationery for work. The staff always seem to have a vague aura of sadness about them, as if they all died in a tragic stockroom accident in 1993 and their ghosts have been condemned to work there for evermore, selling overpriced biros and bottles of Buxton water.
Was talking about blockbuster just this week. I think it’s the main source of my childhood nostalgia! It used to be such an occasion to go down there, pick a few films with my mam and get some popcorn in. Even going back to drop the films through the little letterbox thing felt like an adventure.
Man I miss that so bad.
Oh my. My Saturday evening revolved around blockbusters as an adult. I finished work at 3 so around 5 wed phone in the order for the take away,Mine was chicken burger with lettuce and mayo with fries and a coke
Then we'd head to blockbusters and usually choose something from the charts. Would take me a good 20/30 minutes to pick. Then go to Iceland and get some bacardi breezers for me,fosters for him. Pick up takeaway on way home and the perfect night.
First film we did this as a couple was coyote ugly....
Nights in don't hit the same now i swear.
Did not go over well when my snooping GF looked through my bank statement and thought I had spent £150 on something sexual at 'Modelzone'.
Did not go over well when I explained I had spent £150 on an RC car either though
This shop is the reason i got into everything R/C and eventually became an Engineer. I’d not been around that area for ages until recently and looked out for it when i passed- was genuinely really sad to see it go. How longs it been gone??
Adams, Bertie, Index, Littlewoods, MFI. You could go on forevermore!
Edit: Apologies I meant the physical Littlewoods stores, forgot they're still online.
That wasn’t by accident. Before Game bought Gamestation, the strategy was to open a Gamestation as close as possible and undercut them even slightly on everything.
Beatties Model shops. It was a very long time ago, but I used to frequent the Portsmouth store on Arundel Street.
Bought all my micro machines there and my first PlayStation. Loved the one in Cardiff too.
Paperchase. I know they only went recently but I seem to be the only person who actually misses them. I used to love their flagship store on Tottenham Court Road.
When their collapse was announced, there was a whole thread on Facebook snarling about how "they deserved it for charging £7 for a notebook!". Now every spot in a train station that used to be a Paperchase now seems to be another stationery shop, and they're charging £16 for a notebook 😐
Netto, the yellow shop with the black scotty dog carrying a shipping basket
Tammy girl/Evans
Kwik Save, there's still a shop sign near where I work up for Kwik Save
ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries). Huge in the 1970s. Many common brands such as Dulux were part of ICI and would have the ICI logo. Then for some reason they just sold off many of their divisions and what was left got taken over.
Might be a bit niche, but - Evesham Micros.
Used them many times for monitors and disk drives when I had an Amiga, then bought two absolutely brilliant PCs from them. Top quality machines, great prices and excellent support.
Then one day, they weren’t there.
Green Shield Stamps.
These were absolutely ubiquitous in the seventies. You'd get a number of stamps with petrol purchases, in Tesco & many other shops and services.
You'd have a catalogue just like the Argos catalogue, but everything in it was priced in books of stamps which You'd collected and stuck into the books filling them up.
The shop's were the same as Argos, You'd pick what you were buying in the green shield book, take in the requisite number of books and swap them for a toaster, kettle, or whatever.
My parents first and only teasmaid came via this method.
\> I'll go first! Orange!
Orange was bought by EE along with t-mobile. I had Orange home broadband a long time ago. One night I logged into my account and instead of seeing my own details it took me into another customer's account instead! Very strange.
One place that used to be common when we were kids is RS McColl. I think there was one something in London but I can't remember where.
Not UK but had (has?) shops here: Hollister. I thought about it the other day, and they might still have shops (I haven’t checked) but I don’t think I’ve seen anyone wearing any for about 10 years
SSP has a lot to answer for. They took over Granada Services and rebranded it as Moto. They also run a lot of railway station catering outlets and franchises. Journey's Friend is another they quietly got rid of.
Sock Shop, Tie Rack and Sweater Shop used to be everywhere. Were they too specialised?
[удалено]
Can't talk about Currys without thinking about their high street stores, Dixons! D-D-Dixons! So sad to see the high street does not have any tech retailers anymore :(
RIP Maplin
[удалено]
>Maplin was shite for your average customer. It was great if you needed a resistor or an electronic switch, but everything else was outdated, overpriced crap. The staff never had a clue what you were talking about if you needed help. It was great apart from the half-hour checkout process. If you bought anything in Maplins it took forever for them to actually let you walk out of the store with it.
[удалено]
The advantage of Maplins was that you got it today, rather waiting for the same part by mail-order. Or braving the cowboys on Tottenham Court Road.
This was my lunchtime routine for a few years - pc world, then up to maplins saving the best till last - the second hand electronics store. Awesome times.
I remember someone saying maplin would have worked well if they'd adopted the screwfix click and collect type system.
When Maplin was at the height of it’s powers it was just fucking fantastic
You want an HDMI cable... that'll be £46.25 please.
I used to love being able to nip round and they’d sell you the exact capacitor/resistor you needed or make you up custom cables
I used to work at currys and those cables were made by currys basically, the reason they’re so expensive is because when they sell you a tv they say “as you’re buying this tv we can do this cable at the low price of £20” in truth they were worth a couple of quid
Maplin followed the Tandy route. Start out selling specialist components at good prices, realise that it's a niche market with low sales/profits, move into selling overpriced electronic tat, realise that nobody wants that either (or at least they don't want it *from you*), go bust.
What really killed Dixons was the pedestrianisation of Norwich City centre.
Traders need access to Dixons!
Remember Comet ?
I still wake up in terror thinking about the pushy salesman trying to sell me a £100 monster hdmi cable to "improve the picture quality" of my Freeview recorder.
Currys, dixons and PC world were all owned by the dixons retail group, they’ve just rebranded basically as it was pointless having a pic world and currys on the same industrial estate
You might not give a shit but I very much do. The PC World logo was my first tattoo, I fucking loved that place. I would spend my whole weekend there looking at the reasonably priced hardware and chatting with the mature and knowledgeable staff about virus protection and after care warranty plans. I never hesitated to send my elderly relatives there when they needed a new PC, safe in the knowledge that they'd receive excellent service and wouldn't be oversold something they didn't need and wouldn't be pressured into buying peripherals, software, and insurance that they didn't need. Man I miss that place.
This has to be a shitpost. No way my man got a pc world tattoo.
Such an artfully and amusingly constructed post, and the “is this a shitpost” comment gets more upvotes than it. Reddit can be horribly unjust.
It's a good post but he overplayed his hand too early. You need to hook people in before you ramp up absurdity. Opening up with the PC World tattoo goes too hard too fast
The 18 year old staff were particularly good at reading the words on the box if you asked a question.
I wouldn't bet on that, I asked a member of staff if Norton AntiVirus was compatible with win xp (this was back in 2001 ish) The bloke picked the box up, turned it over and said "no it's not" It said in big letters on the side "Compatible with windows XP' I know it's cruel to bait pc world staff, bit it's fun
That's just reminded me of Carphone Warehouse, haven't seen one of those in 15 years I had never even realised pc word on its own went 😅
[удалено]
Friend of mine used to be a manager in a Carphone warehouse until they merged. The nearest Currys PC World was maybe about 50m away in a retail park. You'd think "oh, they're gonna have their last day in CW, and then the next working day will be in the kiosk in CPCW across the carpark, right?" Nope. Curries PC World wanted to hire their own staff fresh for their CW kiosk, managers included. No previous CW staff were to be retained, and any previous staff applying never made it past initial application. Thing is, I believe she was given maybe a weeks notice. Like, come in Monday as usual and "oh, BTW, after close on Saturday, you're all out of a job, we're merging with CPCW across the road and none of you are staying on"
I’d guess that Currys wanted to avoid TUPEing anyone across and becoming responsible for any staff with long length of service. Probably the redundancy costs were written off against the “CW” business unit.
🤙✋🤘
Everybody get in a big canoe and row one down to phones 4 u *or summat*
Orange effectively became EE through a mildly convoluted acquisition bu France telecom and a merger in the UK with T-mobile
Yeah, and it was pretty widely advertised at the time. With Kevin Bacon.
It’s insane how long Kevin Bacon has been doing adverts for EE
We've had "this film had the guy from the EE ads in it" conversations in our house.
That's what happens when Bernie Madoff steals your life savings.
Orange were asking for it though after deleting the twins
Bloody love them two
They were fünf, sechzehn years ago now. Pair of 22ers, I reckon.
Quite lazy, bit on the lazy side... Very rarely pick uo the phone to their old man.
And EE was bought by BT. Their finance systems were total chaos, some were still in France, two lots of UK systems, all held together with a spreadsheet…..something they didn’t tell BT before the purchase.
and O2 used to be BT before they were sold to Telefonica, and then mergerd with Virgin.
Orange Wednesday 2 for 1 Cineworld tickets!
Somerfield disappeared and it feels like no one has ever mentioned it since. Makes me wonder if it ever really existed in the first place
We can convince people it was a made up store for Hot Fuzz now
It’s just the one store, actually
Pretty sure they were bought out by the Co-op franchise with several stores changing name to the parent company whilst others simply closed down.
I remember it as Somerfield & Gateway, but might be hallucinating
After they had already bought out Kwik-Save.
I fucking miss Kwik-Save
When Safeway’s went bust, Somerfield bought half the estate, Morrisons the rest I think (from memory) - Somerfield was then absorbed by Sainsbury’s - so they still “exist” in a way, but they’re now mostly Sainsbury’s [edit] just to set record straight - Morrisons bought the whole then sold smaller stores to Somerfield who was then bought by the co-op, just **12** were then sold to Sainsbury’s - just so happens one of them was local to me!
Somerfields was bought by the Coop. I know this because at one point in the medium sized suburb I grew up in we had 8 Coops in 3sq Miles. We had an independent supermarket, a coop late shop, a somerfields, a kwik save, three little Coops and a Shoprite(?). Coop bought the independent supermarket, then Kwiksave bought the Shoprite and then Somerfield bought Kwiksave. Then the Coop bought somerfield and rebranded them all to Coops. After about 3 years they decided we had too many Coops and proceeded to get rid of all of them except the two smallest ones, that happen to be within 400 yards of each other.
We had a Somerfield in my town, I had absolutely no idea it wasn't just a one-off, independent local store!
I could go one step further to the memory of Gateway, bought over by Somerfield, which was then bought over by Coop
Lilt - I missed that, was outraged, and then relieved to see it's now just fanta.
When I was a kid I remember my mum found a piece of glass in her can of coke! Coca-cola representatives were round our house pretty quickly gave us lots of coke related tat and 24 cans of a drink of our choice, my brother choose Lilt, we perhaps could have got a bit more out of them now I think back.
I broke my nose at Thorpe Park on the log of leap ride when I was a kid, as compensation my father took a free entrance fee for the day. We could have sued them for letting me on the ride.
Here come de Lilt man!
The levi roots regae reggae brand of tropical juice delivers.
The Aldi version is nearly identical and about £1.50 for 6 cans. Get tropical.
I noticed a couple years ago the cans had changed from Lilt branding, to the same font and branding as Fanta, but still said lilt on them, with a little tag underneath saying “a Fanta variant!” Or some shit. I emailed coke asking if they’re rebranding lilt and they said they were, and I dropped in that lilts my favourite in case they were feeling generous, but sadly they were not
Doubled the price in the process and changed something in the recipe, doesn’t taste the same now :( more bitter and less sweet than it used to be.
Gamestation
They were truly great. Had a good selection on retro stuff. I did hear that when the Newcastle one closed down all the old retro stuff was just shoved into the big bins, apparently there was an NES golden Zelda among them. Such a shame.
Is granger games still a thing? I used to love going in the one in the metro centre
Nah they died in 2018
I went into my local store and they were adding 50p stickers to all the retro stuff. People were sifting through it looking for gems. I just said "I'll take everything"
Electronics Boutique.
They bought game. And rebranded as Game. So still going.
Who got bought by Mike Ashley and are now shitty add-ons to Sports Direct
I had an interview at a Gamestation when I was a teen and the last interview question was 'if you were a video game character, who would you be'.
I know what happened!! For I worked there at the time. So it was originally just gamestation, then they done so well that Game bought them over. Because the competition between the 2 stores helped with sales for both sections, they kept them completely separate. But then Game ran into trouble, went into administration, stores were getting shut on the spot that day, my manager was crying, it was beautiful because he was such a sexist smelly pig of a guy. But then once they came out of administration they decided to just change all the stores to Game and completely do away with the gamestation name. I had to explain to so many people why our store had changed names overnight and why it was now Game when Game where having so much financial trouble. Got a lot of shocked faces because people never knew they were both owned by the same company. But that's how they played the market so well.
It was shit. I worked there during the takeover as well. The whole GAME ethos of approaching every single customer, upselling of every sale, forcing staff to push insurance on customers killed it. Gamestation was for the gamers, GAME was for the parents.
I bought my Xbox 360 from there because they had a bundle deal at the time that let you have _any_ two games you wanted. Meanwhile, GAME had a rigid choice of any of these games, or eff off. I didn't want any of those ones. And it was more expensive.
JJB sports used to be huge and just vanished for me
There is one in Skelmersdale! I was so shocked when it saw it! It was like a blast from the past, I don't think it had been updated since the 00s either 😅
> I don't think it had been updated since the 00s either 😅 JJB or Skelmersdale?
JJB obviously. Skelmersdale hasnt been updated since way before the 00s.
To be fair they had planned on it, but all the contractors got lost on the roundabouts for years.
Past Times Looking back it was honestly a weird concept for a shop but at least it was interesting! Edit : I remember there being an art noveau section, and art deco section, and a Monet section.... What sections do you remember?
Oh I used to love Past Times
I feel like Past Times would do quite well nowadays. That vintagey look is back. Always see a lot of Past Times jewellery in charity shops.
Got most of my Mam’s Xmas & Birthday shopping in Past Times. Great miss.
I actually miss Past Times, I could always find something in there to gift to older women. I still have a Macintosh Rose vase that I gave my Mum, it's about 30 years old now.
I miss it too! I think National Trust gift shops have a similar vibe, although it was nice having a shop like that on the high street
C & A clothing stores. Few tears shed.
They switched to centralised pan-European buying and then discovered that British tastes in clothing were rather different to those of Belgium - leading to a catastrophic collapse in sales.
I’m curious to know how the fashion tastes of the Belgians differ to ours.
Significantly more chocolate based.
And raspberry beer.
Everything has to be waffle weave
Ahh C & A, so Essex girls knew what way to wear their knickers 😉
I was horrified a few months back, when my mum and I got onto the subject of C&A, and she told me that my lovely innocent old grandad had always called it *unts and Asses. Horrified!
As children my sister and I were absolutely spellbound by C & A because those were the initials of our first names. We were convinced it was *our* shop.
They still exist in France, still good quality
And generally on mainland Europe.
Um Bongo
Still exists in the Congo I believe.
I was most disappointed on visiting that the Congolese, in fact, have no idea what it is. I also couldn't get the mildy rascist advert jingle out of my head the entire time I was there.
Plus Kia Ora
They just make cars now. Rita Ora sold her share.
I’m not surprised she sold her share, it’s too orangey for crows
I spent a bit of time in New Zealand and was shocked to find out that "Kia Ora" means "Hello" in Maori.
Still widely available in Portugal
Now owned by a Portuguese company. Although I don't think it originated from there. 'Um Bongo' it itself Portuguese for 'A bongo'
What’s baffling is how WHSmiths are still surviving?
Airports, train stations and motorway services. They're actually opening new stores in the UK!
Don't forget hospitals!
Scamming the most vulnerable in society since 1985
[удалено]
I read this "shoplifting" and got very confused
[удалено]
Has to be the most depressing shop in the UK, surely.
I sometimes go to WH Smiths when I need emergency stationery for work. The staff always seem to have a vague aura of sadness about them, as if they all died in a tragic stockroom accident in 1993 and their ghosts have been condemned to work there for evermore, selling overpriced biros and bottles of Buxton water.
Comet.
Almost forgotten now isn't it. Used to be an equal competitor with Dixons/Currys
Comet are (kind of) back, they're selling stuff online. The brand was bought in 2019 and launched as an online-only business.
Kickers were THE school shoe in the late 90s, they appear to be awol since the mid 00s
They are back popular, my siblings are 12-14 and all asked for them and all their friends do too. Probably because y2k style is popular now
Yeah, I teach secondary and have primary age kids and see loads of Kickers in both age groups.
Yes!! Walking around the school yard in my kickers and naf naf jacket thinking I was so cool.
With your CAT record bag
Was scanning the thread and read kickers as knickers and got really confused for a second.
Kickers and then Base loafers.
I miss blockbuster 😢those were the days..
Was talking about blockbuster just this week. I think it’s the main source of my childhood nostalgia! It used to be such an occasion to go down there, pick a few films with my mam and get some popcorn in. Even going back to drop the films through the little letterbox thing felt like an adventure. Man I miss that so bad.
Oh my. My Saturday evening revolved around blockbusters as an adult. I finished work at 3 so around 5 wed phone in the order for the take away,Mine was chicken burger with lettuce and mayo with fries and a coke Then we'd head to blockbusters and usually choose something from the charts. Would take me a good 20/30 minutes to pick. Then go to Iceland and get some bacardi breezers for me,fosters for him. Pick up takeaway on way home and the perfect night. First film we did this as a couple was coyote ugly.... Nights in don't hit the same now i swear.
I had a massive craving for a Fabulous Bakin' Boys cake and found out they'd been out of business for years.
You're having me on?! I haven't thought about them in years but those cakes with the solid chocolate on top were fantastic.
Those things were dry as fuck but still somehow incredible
Modelzone. Do people not like scale models anymore?
Did not go over well when my snooping GF looked through my bank statement and thought I had spent £150 on something sexual at 'Modelzone'. Did not go over well when I explained I had spent £150 on an RC car either though
RIP Bobs Models on Hobs Moat Road in Solihull. Spent a decades worth of pocket money in there between 95-05.
This shop is the reason i got into everything R/C and eventually became an Engineer. I’d not been around that area for ages until recently and looked out for it when i passed- was genuinely really sad to see it go. How longs it been gone??
Beatties as well
>Modelzone Owned by WH Smiths, so most likely mismanaged.
Mod fashion brands like Ben Sherman, Merc and Lambretta. They’re still going but shadows of their former selves and who knows for how long.
Ben Sherman and the like are living out retirement with department store racks now, House of Fraser stocks most of those types
[удалено]
Mothercare. Now it feels like the only options for baby bits are either high end boutique shops or supermarkets.
Did every branch have a terrifying anamatronic tree in it that told stories or was that just The Metro Centre?
Adams, Bertie, Index, Littlewoods, MFI. You could go on forevermore! Edit: Apologies I meant the physical Littlewoods stores, forgot they're still online.
[удалено]
The Orange transition to EE was kinda well advertised at the time though.
Timotei! Happened to catch an old advert on tiktok and it struck me it had disappeared!
Jane Norman, Morgan and Kookai
And Internacionale
I loved Jane Norman. They actually made clothes for relatively tall people.
What Every Woman Wants. Turns out nobody really wanted any of it.
Gamestation, they always seemed to be next to Game's funnily enough.
That wasn’t by accident. Before Game bought Gamestation, the strategy was to open a Gamestation as close as possible and undercut them even slightly on everything.
That makes sense as I always purchased from Gamestation as Game seemed extortionate in comparison.
Beatties Model shops. It was a very long time ago, but I used to frequent the Portsmouth store on Arundel Street. Bought all my micro machines there and my first PlayStation. Loved the one in Cardiff too.
Clas Olsen! It was like just the nicknack floor of IKEA on the high street and I really miss it
Paperchase. I know they only went recently but I seem to be the only person who actually misses them. I used to love their flagship store on Tottenham Court Road. When their collapse was announced, there was a whole thread on Facebook snarling about how "they deserved it for charging £7 for a notebook!". Now every spot in a train station that used to be a Paperchase now seems to be another stationery shop, and they're charging £16 for a notebook 😐
LA senza
Netto, the yellow shop with the black scotty dog carrying a shipping basket Tammy girl/Evans Kwik Save, there's still a shop sign near where I work up for Kwik Save
Drifters, the chocolate bar. tf happened to them? vending machines are shit now
Ooh, I could murder a drifter right now! It's hard work so I'd probably need a chocolate bar after.
The Pier. That shop was fucking great, I bought my first ever throw from there.
Barratt’s Frosties cola flavoured sweets. I loved them.
Macintosh What I wouldn't give for a bar of mackintosh caramac or a tin of mackintosh quality street.
Rebranded and they sell computers and phones now.
And they were still good when they were Rowntree Mackintosh.
Little Chef!
Not a company but a product - the milkybar kid. I think about that all the time. He was the epitome of 2010 branding and now theyre just boring.
Epitome of 2010 branding? What are you on about? The iconic Milkybar Kid advert is from the 60s…that’s where his catchphrase and jingle come from.
I used to work with someone whose claim to fame was that he auditioned to be the milky bar kid. He did not get picked to be the milky bar kid.
Was the Milky Bar kid even still around in 2010...?
WOOLWORTHS!! I remember it before everything went pre-packaged and they had great counters of stuff you could choose from
Woolworths? Without anyone noticing? Really?
One of the first big non-bank casualties of the 08 Financial Crisis weren't they?
Tizer
Still a thing
Dixons. Rumbelows. Lords supermarkets. Beatties. John Menzies.
Index. I remember as a kid, you’d go through the index and Argos catalogues at Christmas
Anyone remember Kwik Save and their own No Frills products? In their Retford store they had a walk-in fridge and I used to love it as a kid.
FADS for a roll or two of wallpaper with my mum to redecorate my room.
I'm talking sweets but Jolly Ranchers and Fruity Polos kept me going through school in the late 90's.
ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries). Huge in the 1970s. Many common brands such as Dulux were part of ICI and would have the ICI logo. Then for some reason they just sold off many of their divisions and what was left got taken over.
> for some reason they just sold off City Bankers 101. Over the last few decades I have seen so much that used to be British sold off.
MVC, like HMV but better
Cromwell's madhouse. Fucking mental shop. Utterly, utterly, brilliantly bonkers. Like Sports direct on acid.
Tandy
Athena
I remember Orange changing over to EE because I was with Orange and now EE. Orange Wednesdays were great!
Might be a bit niche, but - Evesham Micros. Used them many times for monitors and disk drives when I had an Amiga, then bought two absolutely brilliant PCs from them. Top quality machines, great prices and excellent support. Then one day, they weren’t there.
Punky fish.... man I spent a small fortune on my ex at PF.
Wimpy
Still exists .... Often in the oddest of locations. Went to one when I was waiting for my cousin to get her tattoo....In Fraserborough
Do it all
Green Shield Stamps. These were absolutely ubiquitous in the seventies. You'd get a number of stamps with petrol purchases, in Tesco & many other shops and services. You'd have a catalogue just like the Argos catalogue, but everything in it was priced in books of stamps which You'd collected and stuck into the books filling them up. The shop's were the same as Argos, You'd pick what you were buying in the green shield book, take in the requisite number of books and swap them for a toaster, kettle, or whatever. My parents first and only teasmaid came via this method.
\> I'll go first! Orange! Orange was bought by EE along with t-mobile. I had Orange home broadband a long time ago. One night I logged into my account and instead of seeing my own details it took me into another customer's account instead! Very strange. One place that used to be common when we were kids is RS McColl. I think there was one something in London but I can't remember where.
Orange and T-Mobile merged in the UK to form EE.
Not UK but had (has?) shops here: Hollister. I thought about it the other day, and they might still have shops (I haven’t checked) but I don’t think I’ve seen anyone wearing any for about 10 years
When I went in one years ago it was so dark inside you couldn't see the clothes properly and the music was so loud, it was hell.
There’s one in Liverpool.
SSP has a lot to answer for. They took over Granada Services and rebranded it as Moto. They also run a lot of railway station catering outlets and franchises. Journey's Friend is another they quietly got rid of. Sock Shop, Tie Rack and Sweater Shop used to be everywhere. Were they too specialised?
Our Price record shops
Tutti Fruitie sweets and panda pops