WH Smith shows how to be a high street survivor

One retailer that has yet to succumb to the forces that have killed off a string of former high street staples is WH Smith. Partly through selling a lot of them.

But what makes Smiths such a doughty high street survivor?

It’s not as if its shops are particularly pleasant places to visit. They can look shabby, and garish. Stock sometimes feels as if it has been thrown onto the shelves without all that much thought going into it.

The last time I was in one, I was at the checkout in double quick time, just about managing to avoid the chocolate the cashier gainfully tried to draw my attention to, and then I was out.

It was slightly sad to see. Believe it or not, getting a Smiths voucher when I was a kid was a Christmas highlight. The stores had a decent selection of most of what you’d want to buy and were pleasant places to browse before taking the plunge.

But times change and an Amazon or iTunes card is what gets the kids excited now. In the face of that, Smiths is still with us because it has proved to be rather more adaptable than many of its high street peers.

It is not, for example, the first place you’d think of as a purveyor of takeaway food. And yet, that has proved a hit at the travel shops which have been the drivers behind the company’s recent success.

When other lines were struggling, stationary still sold well, so Smiths took note.

Last year grown up colouring books proved a hit, so there were lots of them in the piles of merchandise I mentioned.

This year it’s those slyly satirical Ladybird for adults and mock Enid Blyton books that have done the business. People saw them while buying whatever in their local branches, and picked them up as gifts (Five on a Brexit Island found its way into my stocking).

There are some swings and roundabouts in the latest trading statement. Sales at travel stores open at last a year leapt by 5 per cent for the five weeks to 21 January, quite an achievement given that they did the same last year too, and despite controversy over VAT. A rising number of passengers helped.

The high street stores saw a 3 per cent fall on the same basis. They were flat last year. But that was still better than expected and the city took note. The shares rose by nearly 7 per cent after a downbeat year.

Given the look of the modern WH Smith, would anyone be terribly sorry to see it going the way of Woolworths, or BHS?

Probably not. But while they’re gone, Smiths is still in business after 225 years. Some of the people who bemoaned the loss of those high street icons, without ever darkening their doors, do find their way into Smiths outlets often enough to make the business viable.

Smiths is a survivor, and given the carnage on the high street, driven by first the supermarkets, and then the emergence of Amazon, and eBay, and the internet generally, there’s no greater compliment that a traditional retailer can be paid.