Every firm, after about a hundred years, produces a large book full of dates and photographs of unknown people in suits. This is called a company history. It sells three copies and is then given away to visitors in the company headquarters. One day I would like to take you by the hand and wander through the pages of these neglected masterpieces, but today I want to draw your attention to the first sentence. It goes like this:
“Who would have guessed, when Samuel Snelgrove and Frank Debenham first set up adjoining stalls in Sheffield market in the otherwise unremarkable year of 1889, that a hundred years later the name of Snelgrove and Debenham would be a byword for the most modern retailing and shopping organisation on Britain today?”
The answer to this clumsy question is: Anyone could have guessed, if only they had been armed with Kington’s Laws of Shopping. It is quite possible to predict what is going to happen in any shop in Britain, if only you keep the following ground rules in mind.
1. Man cannot live by bread alone; he needs newspapers, milk and cigarettes too. In other words, all shops spread sideways. A newsagent starts out selling newspapers, tobacco and matches. Very soon he notices that people are asking him for milk as well, so after a decent pause, he installs a fridge. Once he has a fridge with milk in it, he starts storing cold drinks and the occasional packet of butter. After butter comes bacon. After bacon come onions and potatoes, and before you know where you are, the newsagent is a grocer.
The same phenomenon is visible in filling stations, which are opened ostensibly to sell petrol. Within a couple of years, they are also selling fresh flowers, bags of coal, sacks of potatoes, garden furniture, watches costing under £1.99, wheelbarrows and enough sweets to rot all the mouths on the M1.
2. A newsagent never expands by stocking more newspapers. You would think, would you not, that a man who makes his living by selling papers would try to sell more papers by offering a better range of magazines or more interesting foreign newspapers. This never happens. A newsagent does not even try to sell papers – he lets them lie there in a heap, assuming that the customer will rush in and demand one. Similarly, a filling station does not expand by offering more petrol, as a real ale pub might; when did you last see a filling station advertising This Week’s Petrol or Theakston’s Four Star Yorkshire Premium?
A newsagent always expands by selling totally different things. In other words, all shops aspire to the status of a supermarket.
3. All newsagents sooner or later start selling greetings cards, but no card shop ever starts stocking newspapers. In other words, every shop aspires upwards. The ordinary chemist is a very serious man, to begin with. He is selling medicine. But sooner or later he starts selling bags to keep the medicine and wash things in, and he then offers a variety of these bags in different colours and patterns, and before he knows where he is, he has a small corner of the shop offering gifts. But it never happens the other way round – no gift shop ever decided to incorporate a small pharmaceutical corner. And no fresh flower stall ever decided to install petrol pumps, come to that. To put it another way, Tesco eventually stocks very good wines.
This upward drive to respectability is visible everywhere, even in sex magazines. Once-naughty magazines like Esquire and Playboy came to a stage where, craving respectability, they started printing short stories and interviews with intelligent people. Now it is possible to go through these magazines without feeling the faintest interest in sex. (In the case of Playboy, it always was, actually.)
4. Successful shops breed. As shops expand sideways and upwards, they also start to reappear in other places. It would be very hard for W.H.Smith or Woolworths to be famous if there were only once of them.
5. Successful shops breed and become indistinguishable. If you took a foreigner into a large W.H. Smith shop and asked him what kind of shop it was, he would not say a bookshop or newsagent. If you took him to any of the Boots branches I know, he would be unlikely to suspect he was in a chemist. All shops, in their final stages, tend to look like all other shops.
Another part of this rule says that if any shop wants hard enough to be a supermarket it can become one just by relabelling itself. Neighbourhood grocery stores used to be groceries; then they became mini-markets; now they simply call themselves supermarkets.
6. Shopping malls are supermarkets in disguise.
7. The only successful shops are the ones that break all these rules. Think about it. All the above rules are about expansion and going general. But the really successful shops are the ones that ruthlessly decided to specialise and stay small. There is an outfitter in Piccadilly who sells only tropical clothing. There is a chemist near Oxford Circus catering for the traveller. There is a snuff shop in Charing Cross that only sells snuff and tobacco. There is a bookshop nearby called Foyles, which sells only books and has no branches elsewhere; indeed, it has a lunch which celebrates the fact that it does not sell anything else.
8. Every great shopping idea has the seeds of its own destruction. The latest, great idea is to have enormous hypermarkets on the edge of town, where we can drive, park and shop. It’s the ultimate. Just like the department stores were the ultimate and high street shops were the ultimate and Snelgrove’s and Debenham’s little stall was the ultimate. Hypermarkets are about to be replaced by computerised, stay-at-home shopping.
9. At this very moment, a young man called Snelgrove and another young man called Debenham are laying the foundations of a future fortune, by setting up a small flower stall in the car park of a huge hypermarket. In 100 years time somebody will be writing the history of the company.
10. When a company commissions someone to write its history, it is almost always taken over by a bigger firm within twelve months. Little shops that do not expand and do not go sideways into greetings cards do not get their company histories written. But they do not always get taken over and swallowed up, either. Shops that stay small and specialise, have a 5% chance of survival. Shops that grow big and expand have no chance at all of survival.
Moral: Stick to selling petrol. Leave the sacks of potatoes to someone else, before it is too late.
Business Magazine (1988 )
