Comment: Nick Bubb on 25 years of dramatic change in retail

Retailing in 25 years time will be very different, but it will change as dramatically as it has in the last 25?

Marc Bolland of Marks & Spencer is fond of reminding us that when he started in May 2010 the iPad had only been out for a month, but back in 1988 an apple was something you ate every day to keep the doctor away and a tablet was something you took to cure an illness.

In 1988 the mobile phone had barely been invented. It was shaped like a brick and it was unimaginable that one day phones would be tiny and contain powerful computers.

PC World wasn’t created until 1991 (when the first store opened in Croydon) and Carphone Warehouse wasn’t started by Charles Dunstone until about the same time, so the big sectors of mobile phone and PC retailing barely existed when Retail Week started.

Electrical retailing was a big sector in 1988, of course, although the focus was on TVs and VCRs and audio systems. Much like today Dixons was in bullish mood and had just make its ill-fated foray into the US market, via the acquisition of the Silo chain.

And technology was becoming important in retailing. The stock market awarded good prizes to companies using EPoS data to understand their customers and control stocks. The young retail analysts at Morgan Stanley in London coined the term “retail engineering” to describe this process.

Elsewhere in non-food retailing, names like M&S, Boots, WH Smith and Next sound familiar, as they are still around 25 years later. But the late 1980s were the era of the retail conglomerate and companies such as Sears, GUS and Ward White were major players.

Footwear was a big specialist sub-sector in 1988. Sears dominated the high street through its different brands, and owned Selfridges and various fashion chains. The fast-moving Ward White had bought Halfords and was in the DIY sector as well, while GUS ruled the roost in mail order, another big sub-sector of retailing.

There was no Kingfisher back in 1988, but Woolworth Holdings owned B&Q and was becoming a major force in the drugstore market, having bought various small chains to build up Superdrug.

In fashion, there was no Primark, but Burton Group was a big, dynamic player and had become heavily involved in shopping centre development in 1988 just before the crash.

In food retailing Sainsbury was, of course, the main player when Retail Week started, although Tesco was growing quickly. Morrisons was a very small regional chain and the group with the second biggest amount of superstore space was the long-gone Argyll, owner of Safeway…

The last 25 years have therefore brought dramatic changes in the publicly quoted face of UK retailing and I’m sure that new retailers will emerge from nowhere in the next 25 years to challenge the incumbents, although predicting the precise shape of retailing in the year 2038 is probably a task for another column.

Let us all hope that our beloved Retail Week still exists in 2038, celebrating its 50th Birthday, even if it is then called Etail Week.