A BUDGET fashion retailer has confirmed it is shutting one of its branches in a quaint market town.
The Bonmarché on Grantham High Street in Lincolnshire is set to close its doors for good – and its loyal customers are gutted.
One claimed it’s “the only decent place in Grantham to buy ladies clothes” while another lauded its customer experience as “excellent service as always”.
The chain is famous for flogging fashionable clothing on the cheap, paying particular attention to larger sizes.
The Grantham store is rated 4.4 stars out of five on Google.
It’s not yet clear if the closure brings any job losses but there are over 2,600 stores nationwide and more than three stores in Lincolnshire.
Bonmarché was founded by Indian immigrant Parkash Singh Chima in Cambridgeshire back as a door-to-door business in 1982,
Chima then moved up north to Yorkshire and opened his first store in Doncaster, before it expanded across the UK.
The high street chain was acquired by the Peacock Group in July 2002.
A spokesperson for the chain explained the reason behind the closure but did not specify an exact date for the shutters to come down for good.
“Bonmarché has refocused attention on customer experience in store and online, through upgrades to the stores and having invested significantly to optimise its store footprint.
“Store numbers increased from 201 in February 2023 to 227 Bonmarché stores across the country today – including the Bay Tree Gardening Centre store in Spalding.
“Whilst website traffic has been a driver for increased sales, with orders increasing 17.4% on Bonmarché on the year before.”
But we reported earlier this year that Bonmarché has plans to open new stores in Bradford, Lincoln, Milton Keynes, Inverness and Stirling.
The chain is one of three iconic British fashion retailers to open 100 new high street stores over the next 18 months.
The parent of Bonmarché, Edinburgh Woollen Mill (EWM) and Peacocks is looking to open 100 new UK stores across the UK.
The new store openings are expected to create over 500 jobs.
It comes just three years after the investment consortium, Purepay Retail Limited, bought all three brands out of administration.
Some retailers have closed a few branches here and there for various reasons, like when a store lease has come to an end.
Other examples of one-off rather than widespread closures is if there are changes in the area, like a shopping centre closing, and in some cases a shop will close to relocate to another area.
Some chains have faced tougher conditions though, forcing them to shut dozens of stores, or all of them in the worst case.
Why are retailers closing shops?
EMPTY shops have become an eyesore on many British high streets and are often symbolic of a town centre’s decline.
The Sun’s business editor Ashley Armstrong explains why so many retailers are shutting their doors.
In many cases, retailers are shutting stores because they are no longer the money-makers they once were because of the rise of online shopping.
Falling store sales and rising staff costs have made it even more expensive for shops to stay open. In some cases, retailers are shutting a store and reopening a new shop at the other end of a high street to reflect how a town has changed.
The problem is that when a big shop closes, footfall falls across the local high street, which puts more shops at risk of closing.
Retail parks are increasingly popular with shoppers, who want to be able to get easy, free parking at a time when local councils have hiked parking charges in towns.
Many retailers including Next and Marks & Spencer have been shutting stores on the high street and taking bigger stores in better-performing retail parks instead.
Boss Stuart Machin recently said that when it relocated a tired store in Chesterfield to a new big store in a retail park half a mile away, its sales in the area rose by 103 per cent.
In some cases, stores have been shut when a retailer goes bust, as in the case of Wilko, Debenhams Topshop, Dorothy Perkins and Paperchase to name a few.
What’s increasingly common is when a chain goes bust a rival retailer or private equity firm snaps up the intellectual property rights so they can own the brand and sell it online.
They may go on to open a handful of stores if there is customer demand, but there are rarely ever as many stores or in the same places.
