Pound shops are vanishing from the high street

Telegraph

07-03-2025

Poundworld, Poundland, Poundstretcher – where does Britain's pound-shop obsession end? If you opened up a pound-shop empire today what would you call it – Poundtown? Pound Kingdom?
Thankfully, it seems unlikely there will be further additions to the utterly saturated discount concept after the owner of Poundland raised the 'for sale' sign over the 825-store chain. How fitting if it lived up to its name right until the bitter end and was sold for a pound.
But even that may be wishful thinking. With Pepco, its owner, only just beginning to look at what it calls 'all strategic options', it's early days in terms of what precisely the chain's fate will be, but it is probably fair to say that everything will be downhill from here, and not just for this version of the tired bargain-basement model.
After the collapse of Wilko, and two profit warnings at B&M, the discount boom is surely over, meaning a welcome retreat for a phenomenon that is responsible for dragging the UK's broken high street to new lows in many places.
It is a trend that started to take shape more than 30 years ago, before exploding during the austerity years that followed the financial crash. Along with the pound stores came the bargain chains – B&M, Home Bargains and The Range – all of them peddling more or less the same cheap wares to hard-up shoppers, just under a different name.
It is no coincidence that many resemble little more than glorified jumble sales at times. Poundland was the trailblazer, founded in 1990 by Steven Smith, a former West Midlands market trader. The entrepreneur spotted an opportunity to cash in on the proliferation of pound coins in circulation.
Still, a reckoning for an industry that has created countless copycats with very little to differentiate one from the other feels long overdue. In fact, the UK high street might feel like a slightly cheerier place with fewer of these soulless stores jostling for space, providing of course something better can replace them – a big 'if' in ghost town Britain.
No doubt such an assessment sounds harsh – short-sighted, even. There is clearly a place for any establishment that sells genuinely affordable goods, especially at a time when inflation has been tearing through the economy, pushing up the cost of literally everything to unthinkable levels.
It's probably not an overstatement to say that bargain shopping has been a genuine lifeline for really hard-up families in recent years. But surely there's a limit to how many pound shops and discount dens we are willing to put up with.
Variety retail, as it was once known, has always existed in some form of course. Readers of a certain age will no doubt remember Woolworths fondly, while retail historians may recall that Marks & Spencer has its roots in a concept that began as Penny Bazaar in Leeds in the late 1800s.
Set up by Michael Marks, a Polish-Jewish migrant, its catchy slogan was 'Don't ask the price, it's a penny'. Marks teamed up with Tom Spencer, a cashier at a local warehouse, and by the turn of the century they had nearly 40 outlets.
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.