Poor Poundworld, the last of its 335 shops closing this week with a screw-you shrug at all it’s ever stood for: selling much of its stock at the quite bewildering price of 70p. For me, the feeling of walking into a pound shop has always been one of rare and profound freedom. The knowledge that I can afford anything, the toytown truth of a basket that costs the same as it counts. The fall of Poundworld coincides with the fall of the pound, and I find the whole thing, well, oddly heartbreaking.
In 2011, around its 20th anniversary, I visited the Wolverhampton headquarters of Poundworld’s more successful competitor, Poundland, after they’d seen a gigantic leap in annual profits. The place was buzzing, the cleaner was singing. Sales had leapt to almost £510 million which, using swift mental arithmetic, I translated to mean 510,000,000 bra extenders, Princes chicken tikka Hot Pots or Barbie beach balls. Antibac, muscle soaks, Warburtons, wipes. Towns that had petitioned against their openings, the CEO told me, later saw letters in the local paper declaring their love for the new stores, their modestly priced stationery, their tins of peas. I made a note after washing my hands that in the women’s toilets there was a list of the company’s goals and values pinned to the wall, under their now prescient motto, “Make Poundland great again”.
Those were the glory years of pound shops. After Woolworths collapsed these were the heroes that swept in to fill the high streets’ deserted aisles with a grand assortment of essentials and less so’s – between 2010 and 2016 the number of pound shops almost doubled. My friend Ed noticed the gentrification of his local high street when the 99p store was taken over by a pound shop. Now, the co-founder of 99p stores says the single price point model is “no longer sustainable”. Rising wage costs, business rates and declining footfall, along with a vast change in the way we shop – we know what we want and will click no more than twice for it, rather than traipse on the bus for a lucky dip of household essentials that will almost definitely be discounted more deeply at the supermarket – meant that last year they started to die.
And somewhere along the way, the pound shop became a code word for crappiness. Last week David Lammy called Boris Johnson a “pound-shop Donald Trump”, in March a Labour MP called his party “pound-shop gangsters”, in 2014 Russell Brand called Nigel Farage “a pound-shop Enoch Powell” and a year after that Ed Balls dismissed Brand himself as a “pound-shop Ben Elton” which, to be fair, must have hurt. The implication is that these men are cheap. The ingrained idea there that something’s less valuable because it costs less. That they are discounted versions of the original, whether because past their sell-by-dates or plastic knock-offs, and therefore worse.
Which, as a person with great affection for pound shops, always stings a little. To me it always sounds like quite the compliment – great value, accessible to all, and it might also come with a Toblerone.
But the fascinating thing about modern pound shops, I think, is how they make you aware of your relationship with brands. Poundland quickly realised customers bought more if the packaging didn’t advertise its “extreme value”, and concentrated on designing boxes that looked a little posher. I saw mock-ups of new men’s fragrances, including Sensual Fantasy, What Ever! For Men and, my favourite, the hard-hitting Prague Extreme. A range of fabric softeners was called the Katie Elizabeth collection, after two head-office employees. Walking through my local Poundland today, post-Poundworld’s demise, you see the whole project in a dim new light – though everything costs a pound, some things are more pound-ey than others. The Cadbury’s multipacks for example, the Heinz Baked Beans. Whether in a pound shop or Harrods, our minds have been trained to work the same way, inserting value into the soft gaps between logos – the leather of two handbags is the same, the colour, the shape, but the difference is in the name on the label, which allows for a doubling of price. Even here, when the price is fixed, the knowledge that a branded item is better, safer, worth more, remains.
That was a good day, that day in Wolverhampton at Poundland’s HQ, walking open-mouthed through the vast warehouse where palettes of salt and vinegar Pringles were stacked to make new skylines and leaving with a bag that bulged with Weight Watchers snacks, Easter eggs and a plastic necklace swinging with a thumbsized cup, on which was written: “Ask me again after one more shot.”
At the station a stranger saw me struggling and approached to politely advise me to double-bag – she opened her Waitrose shopping to reveal a Poundland carrier bag hidden inside.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
