WH Smith was once a clever new thing: now it’s ripe to be disrupted

I’m not in the least surprised to learn that WH Smith has been voted Britain’s worst high-street retailer in a Which? survey of more than 10,000 consumers: this is the eighth year in a row that the newsagent and bookseller has come bottom or second-to-bottom in the same poll. These days its cramped shops give more shelf space to bottled water than to books, but if you do pick a paperback from the narrow choice of ‘bestsellers’ on offer — or a copy of The Spectator, if you can find it behind Men’s Health and Closer — you’re channelled into a dehumanising encounter with a self-service till, usually followed by an ill-tempered encounter with the staff member whose job it is to stand near the machines to make them work and calm the customers.

Trade in WH Smith’s airport and station outlets rose 7 per cent in the six months to the end of February, while its trade in town centres, afflicted in line with many other retailers, fell 5 per cent. Smiths may no longer be the bellwether of bourgeois reading tastes it once was, but the dismal, cost-squeezed format to which it has been reduced by the application of ‘retail engineering’ is evidently robust, and if you bought the company’s shares a decade ago you would have multiplied your money by five. And let’s face it, the civilised bookstore you and I might wish to find in every terminus and high street hasn’t been able to make money for years, as was proved by Waterstones — which last month was sold by its previous Russian rescuer to a US private equity firm, so let’s hope it survives.

Reverting to a favourite theme as entries close for The Spectator’s Economic Disruptor awards, it’s worth pointing out that both Smiths (for convenience) and Waterstones (for choice) were once disruptors of the book trade, just as Amazon (for one-click shopping) has been in the digital era.