High street card retailer with 179 branches to shut site following string of closures in ‘another great loss’
A POPULAR card retailer has confirmed it will permanently close in just a few months, in another blow to the high street.
Clintons has around 179 branches across the country in cities like London, Nottingham and Sheffield.
It sells all kinds of party essentials such as gifts, cards and balloons.
However, shoppers in Southend-on-Sea will need to find an alternative as the chain has confirmed it will close down its branch at this location at the start of next year.
A local Facebook group confirmed the closure, giving January 2025 as its last month of trade.
Shoppers have shared their sadness over its decision to close online, with one describing it as ” another great loss” to the high street.
A second punter wrote: “Another nail in the coffin for Southend high street.”
While a third said: “Very sad for the staff affected by this.”
The Essex seaside city has waved goodbye to a number of high street shops over the past year, as a push to online shopping and a slowdown in consumer spending bruises trade.
Local pub The Brewers Fayre, also located in the region, shut its doors in July, as part of a string of closures mapped out by its owners Whitbread.
In March last year, its local Shoezone also closed for good and Debenhams also closed in the town as part of its sale to Boohoo.
The Sun has contacted Clintons for a comment.
Clintons Cards announced last year that it is considering plans to shut 38 of its stores in a bid to avoid insolvency.
Half a dozen stores have already closed including in Cambridgeshire, Cumbria and Northamptonshire.
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.
So far this year a number of branches have also said they would close for good.
This includes, its site in Kettering’s Newlands Shopping Centre which closed in May.
Clintons last pulled down the shutters on its branch in Castle Street, Hinckley, Leicestershire on February 17.
The card retailer also closed its branch in Bexhill town centre, East Sussex, this month.
Just a few weeks ago, it also pulled the shutters on its site in Bournemouth.
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.