Woolworths and Peter Lorre

George: Do you realise what this means? It means bankruptcy and scandal and
prison. That's what it means. One of us is going to jail - well, it's not gonna
be me.

The last Woolworth store closed yesterday for good and always. How can that be? In small towns all over the country there will be nothing to do on a drizzly Sunday afternoon but wander the streets; and where will we buy our pick and mix?

So what happened? How can eight hundred shops and twenty seven thousand jobs disappear almost overnight? There can’t be a home in the country that doesn’t have something that was bought from Woolies. I have radios, sheets, candles, screwdrivers, CD’s, video cassettes, towels, place mats, light fittings, paint, corkscrews, Buckaroo, electric screwdrivers, DVD players, things for holding cups in cars, a lava lamp, garden tools, an apple tree, Christmas decorations, sink plugs, children’s clothes, toys, light bulbs…the list goes on.

So what happened? Woolies stocked everything. How could they go wrong? Perhaps the very fact that they tried to stock everything was part of the problem. Perhaps by stocking everything from crisps to crepe paper, plimsolls to pudding dishes, televisions to tiddlywinks, they tried to please everyone all of the time and ended up not pleasing anyone much most of the time. I know that when I wandered into Woolies, as I often did, and couldn’t find what I wanted, that it was an outrage. This was Woolies. It should have everything. But thinking about it in recent years, although I continued to wander in as often as ever, I usually left having bought nothing. You see I couldn’t seem to make my mind up what they were selling and I found the Woolworth shopping experience very confusing. There were a few books, but not the one I wanted. There were CD’s, but I couldn’t work out how to find the one I was looking for. There was paint, but only in six colours. What were Woolworth’s selling? What did they stand for? What was their identity? It was all so much easier on Amazon, and you could search Amazon from your armchair.

Back in 1964 when my very young father took me to Woolies and bought me a clockwork boat it was very clear what they were selling; dreams and joy. My tiny speedboat had a red hull, a white cabin and a silver key sticking out of the top. It was made from shiny, rigid plastic and cost one shilling and sixpence (seven and a half pence in today’s money). We were on holiday. It could have been Mablethorpe or Yarmouth, I can’t remember, but it was one of those rare warm sunny days and wherever we were there was a boating lake on the promenade. I couldn’t wait to get my boat out of the box and into the water. I ripped off the cardboard packaging, wound the silver key, put my boat in the water, and watched it move towards the middle of the boating lake; where it tipped over and sank. It leaked and so did I, I cried. So my Dad took off his shoes, rolled up his grey flannel trousers, paddled out and got it back for me. He examined it and found that hull wasn’t completely sealed to the deck on one side. We tried putting some elastic bands around it to see if that would keep it watertight, but when we sent it “clicketing” off across the water it sank for a second time. By this time Woolies was shut so we couldn’t take it back, and for me the whole thing had lost its shine anyway, so we went to the early evening beach and built sandcastles instead.

A few years later, I was probably about ten or eleven; I spent an exciting, breathless couple of hours following Peter Lorre, the film actor who I’d seen in Casablanca on the telly the previous evening, into and around the Woolworth store in Aylesbury. He was wearing a black overcoat and a grey fedora and was obviously on a secret mission. He wandered around the store trying to look casual but he wasn’t fooling me; I knew he was up to something. After a long time he bought an Easter egg, left the shop and went out into the bustle of Friar’s Square. I rushed to keep up with him but before I could get through the red painted glass doors he’d slipped into the crowd and I’d lost him. I can only guess at what mystery was hidden inside that gold foil-wrapped chocolate egg. It may have been a secret message, or a bomb, or maybe even a small cellophane packet of multi-coloured Smarties. I’ll never know.

Good-bye Woolworths, I’ll miss you but I went over to Wilkinson’s a long time ago. I wonder how long they will last?

It really was Peter Lorre, wasn’t it?