are woolworths pulling the plug on big W stores

pud1

i was in the Manchester Big W store last week and found that all mens clothes were reduced by 70% i mentioned this to a work colleague who said that the Big W in bolton had closed does anyone know if they are all closing

Aussie

Big W in Bolton is going to be an Asda.. don't know about the rest though

bright_side

Big W in Norwich has gone back to Woolies......

bylromarha

I wondered this too...the Coventry Big W is closing down...got some great bargains to sell on ebay!

Looked on the big w website and it takes you straight to the woolies site, so I'm guessing yes they are closing. i think its a shame as I loved our big W...well loved is a little strong...it was a good place to shop, put it that way!

incidentally, to "compensate" for closing, our Big W has lots of leaflets on the end of the checkout pointing you to the nearest woolies and giving you £5 off a £20 spend in the named branches. Maybe I'll use mine to buy hubby all the Pick and Mix he's dreamed of!

Clareo

Telegraph 9/01/05 says that 7 stores are being bought by Asda and Tesco. Asda - Bolton, Aberdeen and one more. Tesco - Redruth and 3 more. The remaining 14 will be reduced in size and rebadged as Woolworths. Not sure if anything has changed since 9th Jan!

tiff

New store opening in south Bristol, was going to be Big W but signs up say Woolworths.

tobyjug

I read in The Times a couple of weekends ago that the Big w's had been bought by Tesco and that they were looking at using the premises for Big electrical and homeware shops ie without food.

Aussie

It's a weird world out there with supermarket giants...

When Morrison's bought all those Safeway stores, some stores changed to Morrison's, some Safeway's changed into Asda's and some either old Safeway's or Morrison's have been taken over by Tesco.

Allsorts are going on, good for the building trades but not if your local changes for the worse!

advantage_card

With regard to Morrion's they couldn't just buy the *chunks* of Safeway they wanted, they had to buy the whole ot. Then the Competitions Commission said they had to sell about 60odd stores in overlapping areas i.e where there were too many Morrisons and Safewasy together. Some have gone to Watirose, and some to other retailers as mentioned above. They have since sold a shedload of *smaller sized* stores to Somerfield, in more rural areas.

Regarding Big W, this was started off when Woolworths was part of the Kingfisher group, because Kingfisher saw the gorwing demand for outlets in retail parks.

Woolworths has since been de-mergd from Kingfisher and is nwo a sperate enity, although it also owns the MVC record/cd stores which were also one time part of Kingfisher. Kingfisher is now concentrating soley on DIY stores and has bundled the electrical arm like Comet into a seperate unit.

So obviously since Woolworths has become a seperate enity they have had another look at it and perhaps thought that these hugre retail-park location sore are not for them and decided either to sell them or scale them back into normal Woolworhs stores.

That's my take on it anyway - a lot of the information about onwership is form reading the teletext finace pages!

withabix

All the BigW stores seem to be full of junk now. Big name stuff before Christmas, now just rubbish.

Victor_Meldrew

I seem to remember some time ago reading that Woolworths had decided to switch from larger out of town type stores back to smaller shops that were in town. Which makes their decision to close their smaller shop in loughborough and move to a larger purpose built Big W just 2 years ago rather strange. I'd assumed then that they would sell these larger stores.
Wasn't impressed with Big W just cheap tat really.