Select Store just ‘slipped’ away…
Well another day and another casualty to the High Street ‘juggernaut’ that is taking out shops at a relentless pace. I only discovered that my local Select store was shut when I went past there earlier this week and had planned to pop in for a quick browse, only I couldn’t…as it was gone and another shop had taken it’s place…like it never even existed!
Select’s party clothes + accessory not ‘appropriate’ in the current climate…
Just gone like it literally ‘evaporated’ into thin air, not even a ‘skeleton’ left behind nothing…not a trace…well the ‘good ol’ days’ of just walking down your High Street and expecting to ‘go shopping’, seem very close to being well and truly over, good grief…and I’m not saying the Select store was my favourite shop or anything but really…it was somewhere to ‘go’. I mean I didn’t really buy much from there…though the upstairs of this particular shop always amazed me, as this was where the reduced stock used to go, racks of it ‘jumbled about’ with the room really badly lit…and nearly every time I went up there I was usually the only one or occasionally someone else was there.
R.I.P some of the Select’s items BEFORE it went to ‘sleep’ on a permanent basis…
It was kinda funny in that they actually had a few signs around the store saying ‘no photography’ like..why? Well I basically ignored that and just took pictures anyway – as you can see! (so were they just ‘copying’ Selfridge’s London in this respect…?). The Select chain went into administration in May this year with 169 stores hanging in the balance, therefore the outlook for my local shop was pretty bleak to say the least and it lasted somehow until October, where I later found an article in the local paper reporting its closure. Unfortunately I have missed out on it’s ‘massive clearance’…so when a shop shuts like this, what happens to the leftover stock?? Where does it all go? Select are still operating online, so I checked out the store finder and typed in my post code only to find no stores at all near me (not even in Basildon…and that’s another story…). Then I just put in my county Essex and then nothing at all comes up, so I put in London and even then nothing…wow!
my store search was fruitless…and yielded absolutely nothing…
Looks like they’ve all shut now? I wonder how long the online store will last? Just until the stock is all gone? Oh dear…it seems now rather that retail will be shunted and stuffed away, relegated to the history books well and truly. My photos document this ‘disappearing world’ possibly reappearing in the ‘Museum of Retail’ very soon…?
Select fashions now ‘museum’ pieces? Looks likely…as you won’t see it anywhere else…