A Son of the Rock

Today Woolies in Kirkcaldy ran its shutter down for the last time.
A fixture on the British High Street for nearly 100 years, a lot of Woolies’ shops were in Art Deco style buildings. Though the Kirkcaldy store shut for a while (its location was at the “wrong” end of the High Street, which ironically has recently undergone something of a regeneration: that’ll probably Credit crunch to a close) it reopened in 1998 in a mall location, The Mercat, which runs off the High Street and back round again to the rear of Marks & Sparks.
I remember the Dumbarton and Helensburgh stores fondly from my youth. They had fantastic wooden floors, their bon-bons and rum and butter caramels were a delight to my young sweet tooth and more recently it used to be good for buying cheaply singles that had recently fallen out of the charts.
I can’t say I made the Kirkcaldy store a destination every week but it was good to have it available for all those things it sold that nowhere else in the town centre did and it held a better selection of sweets than the local Tesco.
It was sad to see the state to which the administrators reduced it in its final days – ugly reduced posters plastered everywhere, as many laundry hooks as you could ever wish for (plus hundreds more,) empty spaces galore on the shelves.
I think it could have been viable but the latest high-ups allowed no leeway to local managers and as a result some of the items for sale verged on the bizarre (though it wasn’t actually in Woolies I saw racks of England tops for sale in Kirkcaldy.)
It will leave a big gap in the Mercat.
Doctorvee has recently posted about Woolies history and has another post planned.