High street card shop with 179 stores to close ‘brilliant’ branch permanently TODAY
A CARD shop which runs 179 stores is to close a “brilliant” branch for good at the end of trading today.
The high street retailer has branches across the nation including places like London, Nottingham and Sheffield.
Customers can get everything from cards, gifts and party essentials like balloons.
But people in Bournemouth will need to go elsewhere after today as the outlet in the Castlepoint shopping centre is shutting up shop after today, according to local news reports.
Fans of the retailer are not happy about the move and have gone online to share their sadness.
One said: “It’s a shame”.
Writing in the Google reviews, another described it as “brilliant”.
Another wrote: “Lovely cards and I always buy them for my family.”
While a fourth added: “Always get a lovely reasonably priced card or cards at Clinton. Wouldn’t go anywhere else. Staff always helpful.”
The Sun has contacted Clintons for comment.
Clintons Cards announced last year that it is considering plans to shut 38 of its stores in a bid to avoid insolvency.
Around half a dozen stores have already closed including in Cambridgeshire, Cumbria and Northamptonshire.
The retailer pulled down the shutters to its branch in Castle Street, Hinckley, Leicestershire on February 17.
Its branch in Kettering’s Newlands Shopping Centre closed on May 8.
Clintons will also close a branch in Bexhill town centre for good this month.
Why is Clintons closing stores?
Clintons is among retailers to have been affected by depressed high street footfall and competition from online rivals.
In August 2023, restructuring experts FRP Advisory and law firm Jones Day presented plans to save the business in an insolvency court.
They came up with a deal to save thousands of jobs and over one hundred UK stores.
But it also involved waving goodbye to a selection of shops that were not earning enough money to keep.
This led to the closure of stores in Cumbria, Bolton and Leeds last year.
Originally, Clintons planned to merge with another struggling stationary brand Paperchase.
However, the firm sadly went into administration at the start of last year.
At its peak, Clinton’s had 2,500 staff working across 335 shops.
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.