Is it farewell for TGJones?

[MN2025]

Just read an article online that the future of TGJones (former WHSmith High Street) business is to be decided in the coming days. It’s not surprising if the business does collapse into administration.

It is a massive shame - as someone who has been in the education profession for nearly 40 years - I always shopped there until the convenience of online shopping came in.

TGJ/WHS priced themselves out and failed to adapt with the times.

i do think that the post office is the only reason stores have managed to survive..

Feel sorry for all the staff who work there.

Cha

'TG Jones' feels pretty desultory. I bought a small cardboard organiser drawer the other week and both the ones they had were dusty and one literally had a load of pink glitter glue spilt all down one side. They obviously can't be arsed to even try any more.

Totally agree. Same is true of Boots. I have been surprised for many years that both are still around.

I spent loads of pocket money in both in the 70s and 80s. They were great then.

Our main town centre Post Office will be lost as well as another High Street Shop remaining empty for years.

It’s what will happen to our post office - the main post office us - there are a couple of sub post offices located out of town, but not convenient for most of us that worries me most.

At airports / stations if I want a bottle of coke etc for the journey I always buy them at Boots not WHSmiths as Boots charges a normal or v near normal price, unlike WHSmiths (charging £4 at Gatwick last week compared to £2.40 at Boots).

When I was a child the best thing you could get for Christmas was a WH Smith voucher - books, music, paints, craft stuff, stationery, board games. I went into the one in Reading a few weeks ago - what is it with the lighting in there?

It is the only place to buy nice cards now that Clinton's is gone. Card factory doesn't have good quality cards. Also the wrapping paper at WHSmith is really good quality. I went into tg jones last week and they were selling extension leads for a £1 and large packs of tape 6 rolls for a £1 too.

It’s a shame. I used to love going to WHSmiths as a child, picking out a couple of books and curling up and reading on a rainy day. Or going there to get all the back to school stationery when I was in secondary school.

Sadly now they don’t really have a niche - the books in Waterstones seem to be more varied, schools have moved online and they’re not really needed anymore.

I do hope the bookseller at the airports stays though!

Also at boots you can save up your points and use them!

They did price themselves out though, Poundland, pound stretcher, B & M, home bargains and The works all sell similar or same products much cheaper.

I prefer to shop in person, and I try to support Smiths (alias Jones.)
But they never have the things I want to buy!

We went in for some gcse revision guides- nothing in the subjects we wanted, but shelves and shelves of 11+ prep books (we aren’t in a grammar area).

I wanted a pack of envelopes - nothing - and a single biro - no, I had to buy a pack of 10 “gel” rollerballs.

I bought the biro and envelopes from the local corner shop, and ordered the revision guides online - and since I was ordering online anyway, I bought them from a different retailer.

I get you can’t stock everything, but this is actually quite a large shop. But it’s cluttered with unpacked crates, it has lots of empty shelves, space is taken up with lots of boxes of sad-looking chocolates and a huge fridge.

But there are plenty of places in walking distance to buy cheaper drinks and chocolate - it’s a busy high street not a station. I don’t need a drink and a snack and something to read all in one purchase.

Had a Saturday shop in smiths in the late 90s, it was always bright and well stocked, with expert staff and a really buzzy feel. Great for CDs and video games and books and stationery and a magazine and chocolate bar and slightly inexplicably a Parker fountain pen off the special counter.

Now they are like some sort of Soviet era, institutionalised hellscape. Our local one has permanent leaks dripping through the ceiling, dim lighting, about one member of staff who seems surprised she might need to do anything while there, and a shitty post office that grudgingly serves people during increasingly erratic opening hours.

Smiths just relies on its airport and station shops for survival, and it shows. I won't mourn its demise, it is an utterly charmless place to shop.

Horrible place
which is sad because as an 80s kid WHSmith was the shop I wanted to go to- it sold all the books and records and magazines I wanted

that said for certain school stationery items there really isn’t anywhere else on the high street. But nobody wants the rest of the stuff they want

btw the travel retail business (airports and stations) still called WhSmith- is an entirely different entity these days and will live on.

about one member of staff who seems surprised she might need to do anything while there

It's the same in my local store. I went in recently and there was a woman stood behind the counter, I tried to pay and she told me to go to the self service machine.

If a can is 340ml then a 500ml bottle contains 47% more Pepsi.

Possibly not your point but fair to point out...

True but £4 is disgusting profiteering when you can get the huge 2L bottles for half that in the supermarket. It's over 4x the price of petrol and that's extortionate enough 😅

This isn't personal to you but this thing about the price of drinks crops up constantly on MN!

The £4 isn't the cost of the drink though is it (probably 5p). It's the cost of setting up and staffing a shop somewhere expensive like a railway station and putting the drink in an inefficient single serving throwaway bottle. Why didn't you bring your own big supermarket bottle from home with you? Obviously it wasn't convenient. So you pay extra for the convenience. Their business model is entirely convenience for people who want something there and then.

Yes but when you have shops like M&S, boots and Sainsbury’s in London Paddington station charging nearly normal prices, it’s not really acceptable.

I am actually wondering if there is a bit of a scandal here.

Last year WHS said it would focus entirely on airports and transport hubs. So they sold the high street business. They said they received £40m for it. It would be interesting to learn if they actually did receive this.

I just wondered if they sold the high street business to a "man of straw" type company fully expecting it to collapse just to avoid redundancy costs and the costs of the premises. Similar to what happened with BHS a number of years ago.

I understand how business works 😅. I understand they need to make a profit but there's a difference between profit and profiteering and this was definitely profiteering. This was a year or so back so I dread to think how much they'd charge now. I went to the small supermarket chain in the same station and the same drink was half the cost. That's not down to rents etc as it's the same station and similar square footage of store.

They weren't undercut by online retailers, they were undercut by every other retailer on the high street. I've not bought anything from them for well over 20 years.

I dont think you can blame online shopping, almost everything they sell can be bought more cheaply at various other actual stores. Supermarkets, Wilkos - although thats on shaky ground as well - the works etc all sell stationary and why do they always ask if you want to buy an overpriced chocolate bar or bottle of water, at the till? There is nearly always somewhere else to buy those cheaper, as well.
They have a wider selection of magazines than anywhere else, and thats about it. My local independent card shop sells nicer (and cheaper) cards ....

They’re going into administration, I know someone who worked there and she was informed of this months ago to give her time to get another job

Check your local library's online offering - many give you access to libby or BorrowBox with loads of magazines.

They never put the lights on in ours. And it was a two story building. You were literally walking around in the dark looking at things u couldn’t see ! It was so dark. I never went back.

My nearest Boots is like that