Much has been written about the pension problem at BHS, but the real issue is that it’s not been very good for some years.
BHS has shut on Oxford Street. Cue lamentations and commentary asking how this could have happened. It happened, bluntly, because both shops and stock weren’t, latterly, up to much.
Pension rights and wrongs notwithstanding, this turned out to be a place that shoppers decided they didn’t like very much and even the much-vaunted lighting department was clearly not enough of an enticement to get ‘em through the doors.
A long time coming
The reality is that things have been at this pretty pass for a long time. BHS has been about commodity presentation at a price, and times have moved on.
Power merchandising, the form of display that entails an awful lot of the same thing on a single piece of equipment, no longer cuts it and yet until very recently (not so much now as the stocks have very gradually been dwindling) this was pretty much what BHS was about.
“Those who made the most noise about the unfolding tragedy at BHS were the ones that might have struggled to remember the last time they actually visited one of its outposts”
And yet it could have been so much better. Had a few steps been taken and the competition scrutinised, it might have been apparent that retailers such as Zara are all about frequent change and the shopfits have been evolving continuously to keep pace with shifting tastes.
The same is true of Primark, which has embraced the world of in-store digital trinkets in the shape of large screens that promote the sense that the shopper is in a location that moves with the times.
Meanwhile, in BHS, a few graphics, aka big posters, adorned the walls and once they were in place, they proved remarkably slow to change – occasionally remaining in situ for a complete season.
Falling behind the rest
As with Woolworths in the last decade, it is also probably the case that those who made the most noise about the unfolding tragedy at BHS were the ones that might have struggled to remember the last time they actually visited one of its stores.
This is a retailer that has discovered that nostalgia ain’t what it used to be and saccharin-made memories about how things might once have been are not enough to ensure the continued smooth running of a commercial operation.
The real question that has to be asked is whether this will ultimately prove to be the thin end of the wedge.
There is at least one other high street behemoth that sells clothing, among other things, largely by commodity and which has been producing indifferent results for some time now. Without naming names, will it be next?
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