UK Edition
‘Will Covid-19 finally kill off Primark mania?’ we asked in this newspaper around two months ago. It seemed possible; the coronavirus pandemic had forced the closure of 188 stores around the UK, leaving Primark lumbered with an estimated £284m of spring stock it couldn’t shift. Unlike almost all of its competitors, this high street chain doesn’t have an ecommerce website, which might have given it a chance to recoup some sales during lockdown.
And yet the enormous queues in front of many of its 153 stores around England on Monday tell a different story. As the 15th June marks reopening day for the great British high street and the first place on the must-visit list for most shoppers seems to be Primark.
One shopper had waited overnight in front of Primark’s colossal 160,100 square foot emporium on Birmingham high street, and hundreds more queued from 4am - the store was supposed to open at 8am, but allowed shoppers in 35 minutes early to ease the crowd. At London’s Oxford Street flagship store - once a landmark tourist attraction - around 100 shoppers queued from 6:30am and brought camping chairs to sit in while they waited. By lunchtime there was a scrum at the door. The demand, they explained, was pent up particularly due to not being able to shop for Primark clothes online.
“We’ve been waiting so long for it,” Stephanie Wells, 38, who was first in line at Primark’s Kingston-Upon-Thames branch, told The Telegraph. She had queued from 7:30am and explained, as she had missed going shopping for clothes in person. “Underwear was the first stop - everyone in the queue was saying they’d come in for knickers. That, and stuff for the kids as they grow so quickly and they’ve not been in uniforms."
"It was so nice when we went in we got a round of applause from the staff," added her sister Nicole Wells, 35. "It felt weird for a couple of minutes and then it just felt normal again.”
Bosses at Primark's parent company, Associated British Foods, will no doubt be relieved that they became Britain’s most talked about destination site this morning. The heat has been on for the company since stores shut on 23rd March - more than 68,000 employees received furlough payments from governments across Europe and Primark agreed to pay almost £400m to its struggling suppliers following a backlash when it threatened to withhold fees and cancel orders.
Primark had already reopened its 32 German stores in the first weeks of May, followed by France, Spain and most recently Ireland on Friday, where it is branded as Penneys. It has had a chance to put into practice its new social-distancing strategies, meaning that shoppers in England this morning had a smooth experience with marked queues and one-way systems around the typically-large shops, with hand sanitising stations, and staff wearing face coverings and gloves.
Despite sitting on a £1.5bn mountain of stock (much of which is supposedly out-of-season) Primark’s finance chief John Bason was adamant he wouldn’t join in the trend for a ‘fire sale’ in their stores - customers hitting the shops today will see everything at its original retail price.
It is certainly a turn around for the brand in an era where fast fashion seemed to be falling fast out of fashion. Primark mania, at its peak in the early 2000s, was categorised by young shoppers indulging in a fast fashion fix; a 20 year-old could fill a bag with new clothes for £40, wear them once and chuck them out.
As climate change became a pre-occupation of a new generation, suddenly, cheap imported ‘pile ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap’ clothes in non-eco friendly fabrics felt out of step with the times. Indeed, in lockdown, small independent brands are the ones which have thrived, as people have had the time to spend more time considering what to buy and the movement towards shopping sustainably has been headline news.
For those who do still want to buy low-priced clothing, the race to the bottom in fashion is now run online. In more recent years, Primark’s key rivals have been the internet-only businesses Boohoo and Pretty Little Thing, rather than Marks and Spencer or John Lewis. Those Manchester-based companies have never bothered with expensive bricks and mortar stores, and keep their costs down accordingly - throughout the pandemic they've continued trading as normal. So it looked like Primark couldn’t win.
Which is why today’s enthusiasm for the shop came as such a surprise. It seems that the British public may have missed Primark as much as Primark has missed its shoppers. But once the ‘first day back’ queues have died down, it will be interesting to see whether this lockdown experience has taught bosses anything about how the Primark business model could still be in danger of going stale. Will they change anything at all? First port of call, surely, should be to invest in a proper website?
Read more: What does shopping for jewellery, engagement and wedding rings look like as shops reopen today?