The credit crunch unleashed a spectacular budget boom. Out went Woolies, and in swept a new generation of discount kings, many setting up in shops vacated by one of the pioneers of affordable shopping. These were the heroes of the post-banking crash recession.
Now it’s gone too far. Expansion has been utterly relentless. In the same way that the UK high street has become a sea of Turkish barbers, vape shops, and overpriced coffee chains, Britain is drowning in cut-price produce. Some retail parks can house three or four of the nationwide chains within spitting distance of each other.
The truth is there is very little, if anything, to distinguish Poundland from Poundstretcher. Ditto Home Bargains and B&M. The experience is pretty much identical, in the same way that only the true nerds would differentiate between an Aldi or a Lidl.
This is shopping with all the joy and pizazz sucked out of it and reduced to the absolute basics – goods piled high and sold in vast quantities, and aisle upon aisle stuffed full of drab soft furnishings, plastic tat from the Far East, and for reasons destined to forever remain unknown, a disproportionate selection of bird food.
As shopping experiences go, it is about as miserable as it is possible to conceive of short of buying some stolen bacon out of a sports holdall from a scary man in the corner of your local pub. And perhaps that’s the point: there are lots of people that don’t care for any theatre or about the way in which the shelves are presented – they just want decent products at rock-bottom prices.
Yet part of the problem is that you get what you pay for, and while it’s hard to get a packet of KitKats or a bottle of Dove shower gel wrong, far too much of what you can find in the aisles of the discounters is of obviously dubious quality that has helped fuel today’s throwaway culture.
Besides, the industry is the architect of its own demise, brought down by the same basic mistakes that are the undoing of so many businesses. Blaming retail’s favourite bogeyman Rachel Reeves certainly won’t cut it. Sure, the Treasury’s tax raid will “add further pressure to Poundland’s cost base” as Pepco puts it – but the key word in that sentence is “further”. Viable retailers will be able to weather the financial hit.
The industry’s reversal has been brought about primarily by greed. The entrepreneurs that led the way are long gone, having made their fortune by selling out to private equity or bigger corporations obsessed with planting flags wherever there’s a gap to be filled. The few that are left are plotting their escape too. The window for cashing in may close sooner than they anticipated.
