His Master’s Voice: Silenced
**When I’m not living in the distant wilderness that is Westwood, I live in the small market town of Dorchester, in Dorset in the South West of England. (If you don’t know where that is, it’s near Bournemouth; if you don’t know where Bournemouth is, then I have no hope of explaining the location to you.) Like many small towns, Dorchester had a thriving Woolworths outlet situated in its town centre which closed when the chain went bust in 2009.**
The demise of Woolworths was particularly hard-hitting in places like Dorchester, for the very same reasons the chain became an irrelevance in major cities: it sold a wide variety of stock at a reasonable price. In towns where the shopping choice is severely limited, this ‘jack of all trades’ capacity is vital; in cities, where better alternatives were more readily available, Woolworths was found to be a master of none.
However, the employees of Woolworths Dorchester refused to accept their fate, and bought the store and re-opened it as an independent business, with the incredibly similar moniker (‘Wellworths’). The move made national news and the BBC filmed a documentary: How Woolies Became Wellies: One Woman’s Fight for the High Street.
The shop was a huge success at first, but in 2010 the Shop Direct Group, which contains Littlewoods and had bought the Woolworths brand for online sales, put pressure on the store to change its name to the less similar (and inexplicable) ‘Wellchester’. Despite still appearing to perform strongly, the business closed in 2012 to be replaced by a Poundland, a sure sign of a town centre in trouble.
So what does the lesson of Woolworths tell us about HMV? First, there is no small-town comparison as HMV has been shedding stores in smaller settlements for years in a bid to delay the inevitable. For example, the nearest store to Dorchester was in Poole, 25 miles away.
Second, whilst Woolworths eventually became an irrelevance to its suppliers, HMV still plays a crucial role in the music industry. Though physical music sales are in decline (currently comprising less than 40% of the entire market) HMV continue to dominate, with around three-quarters of high street music sales attributed to the retail chain.
Neither should lovers of independent music snigger at the demise of HMV- the chain was a gateway to independent music and the shops in which it thrives. Sadly, the collapse of a corporate giant is not likely to give rise to any more worker-owned businesses (exactly the sort of thing a fairer society needs) but may in fact do serious cultural damage.
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