And so it begins…

Oh, its going to be brutal…

Those Woolworth discount vouchers that were floating around on the blogosphere last week generate a moral question. If a company is teetering on the brink of collapse, is it right to flog off the stock at a discount during the desperate days? Surely a company should only conduct a fire sale if it believes that there is a strong argument for recovery?

On one hand, trade creditors (who may technically own the stock if it has not been paid for) face a loss — minor for confectionary goods, but serious for electronic items, DVDs, CDs etc which can be restocked by the supplier. On the other hand, a fire sale generates money for the dying company that may help to meet statutory obligations and primary claims (outstanding wages, redundancy, tax, National Insurance). As more retailers get in trouble, shouldn’t we be concerned about the definition of “trading whilst insolvent”?

The collapse of MFI is interesting because of the company’s business model. My understanding is that the profit from selling furniture was incidental to selling credit services on behalf of other companies. Many car manufacturers, particularly those in the US, operate in a similar way. Are such companies are recoverable, if they are so reliant on consumer credit?

Oh, its going to be brutal…

Yep, my feeling is it will be worse than we’ve ever seen it…

Personally, I’ll miss poor old Woolies.

…although both Woolies and MFI have been effectively bust for donkeys’ years, kept afloat by cheap money and boundless optimism. When businesses that *weren’t* fucked to start with start crashing, *then* it’s Cassandra o’clock.

I feel sorry for all the employees, but I never felt any affection for the store itself. It sold crap at not particularly cheap prices. The same goes for Argos. I wonder how they’re going to get through Christmas in a recession. Practically all there profits come from Christmas, but then that’s true of most retailers. Ho hum.

No, Argos is different: it sells crap and non-crap, and the crap that it sells is popular branded crap plus useful crap. Its staples are cheap-ish kids’ toys and very cheap electronics – and that’s precisely what people will be buying for Xmas this year. Woolies is shafted because everything it sells is too embarrassingly rubbish to even give to your kids for Xmas…

“Woolies is shafted because everything it sells is too embarrassingly rubbish to even give to your kids for Xmas…”

Ho, ho. A very fair analysis.

Argos isn’t that cheap, though, and that’s its problem. It’s not a specialist store and so all it has going for it is cost and convenience. Its not that cheap, so the former is nullified. Essentially it’s reliant on a load of lazy/unorganised shoppers, who don’t want to go online. That market isn’t going to be there during a recession as people will be bending over backwards to get stuff as cheap as possible.

Woolies is shafted because everything it sells is too embarrassingly rubbish to even give to your kids for Xmas

Nail, head.

I was in Woolies last Wednesday.

I bought a Peppa Pig play-set for my daughter, the new Dido CD for my wife, and a space-gun for my boy.

A month ago I bought The Wire series 5 for £25, cheaper in store than both Amazon.co.uk and Play.com on the day. I got Gears of War 2 for the XBOX 360 for £32 (after it had gone up to £40 in Gamestation).

They can be competitive and they don’t sell just crap.

All that said, your perceptions are more indicative than my experiences. After all, they’re going to the wall.

Personally, I’ll miss them.

“Essentially it’s reliant on a load of lazy/unorganised shoppers, who don’t want to go online. That market isn’t going to be there during a recession as people will be bending over backwards to get stuff as cheap as possible.”

About half the population have never shopped online and don’t trust the Internet not to steal their money. If that group doesn’t skew towards Argos’s core lower-income, C2DEs, market then I’d be extremely surprised.

Anyway, we’ll see. My guess is that, because this recession will hit the middle classes worst, the budget end of the spectrum will mostly survive (unless they’re tipped over the edge by Woolworths’ fire sale, which I suppose is possible).

Essentially it’s reliant on a load of lazy/unorganised shoppers, who don’t want to go online.

Lazy?

So it’s those who actually leave the house, rather than those in front of their computer screen eating microwave pizza, who are the lazy ones.

Oh.

I had been wondering why they hadn’t replied to my job application.

I bought some new shoes on line in the Debenhams sale

When they arrived they were different to how they looked in the photo on the website, far too pointy and shiny, make me look like an Elve or something, so I’m gonna take them back and get some different ones.

Buying stuff online isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, especially as the postman comes after the house is empty meaning I have to queue up at the parcel depot on saturday (which closes at 11:30 for some stupid reason) thus wasting time I could have spent in a shop browsing for something I really like.

Clothes sizes are also inconsistent, for example Next medium always fits me, whereas M&S medium is a bit small, there’s nothing worse than clothes that don’t fit properly, so I have to go back to the shop, may as well have just gone there in the first place.

That’s my opiniion anyway

Woolies are going to have a fire sale?

(Circles overhead, looking for bargains)

I’ll miss it, if only because there was no other obvious shop to find all sorts of odds and ends in one place, rather than somewhere that needed a Mary Portas-style makeover.

Robert Dyas, man – that’s the best odds and ends shop in the entire planet…

I’m living in Newark-on-Trent at the moment.

We’ll have an Asda next year, but our enormous Woolies is a great out-of-town shop that is open until late (it’s a former Big W, on a retail park).

Huge DVD and gaming section, and a big toy department for replacement Spider-man toys when my boy has twisted the arms and legs off his.

I’m left with a utterly mediocre Morrisons and the abomination that is WHSmiths’ pricing.

Also, in agreement with Matt above, I wouldn’t dream of buying clothing online. Also, I still like buying records from record shops, books from book shops, and one of my biggest guilty-pleasures is Hi-Fi equipment – which should be auditioned before you buy. It’s not disorganisation or laziness, I just like getting out of the house. Call me old fashioned.

I buy car-insurance, software, plane tickets, and the odd DVD boxset online. Little else.

Argos will do well as a lot of single mothers shop there and they still have plenty of cash to spend from the govermant its why brighthouse is doing so well

I didn’t mean physically ‘lazy’, I meant too lazy to shop around for bargains, on the high street or online. Argos is rarely the cheapest place, and so – as people will be looking for bargains because cash is tight – it will lose some of its Christmas share this year.

Carl wins twatlord points. Jeebus, can we not have a little revolution, just one where we murder the fuckwits who blame the poor for everything…?

I am going to miss Woolworths. There’s something very ‘back to childhood’ about it for me.

“Jeebus, can we not have a little revolution”

I wonder if there’s an overlap with the people who claim every reactionary right wing policy going is good for the poor? We’ve got one on our local forum claiming abolishing the congestion charge is good for the poor. It’s projection, presumably.

Mind you I favour humiliation over extermination.

I went to the woolworths sale in watford herts this morning to be dissapointed again. Last week they said they were having a sale so I went for a look to find that there was no sale at all the half price tags had already been on all the toys they said retail i.e. 79.99 now 49.99 what aload of crap they allways do this to rope you in I was very dissapointed.Then the further 20 percent off was only on limited items I could find a single thing for my 4 year old son so I went to wilkinsons where I could alot of stuff at much cheaper prices than woolworths.Its all one big scam