Everyone shops at Argos. And for the past 40 years, it has been an institution on our high streets and in our homes, thanks to the famous catalogues. One writer recalls her milestone purchases and how the chain put an aspirational lifestyle within the nation's grasp
Why does Argos make people laugh? There is no punchline, by the way; this isn't a joke. The shop is celebrating its 40th anniversary this summer, but despite that small lifetime on British high streets, it has never been seen as impressive nor iconic. It has survived the recession intact – unlike Comet, HMV, Jessops, Habitat and TJ Hughes to name a few – and without deserting the high street. Yet it is neither held up as a model for good governance in the way that John Lewis is, nor as a teller of retail fortunes, in the way of Marks & Spencer. It is not even deprecatingly beloved in the way that good old Woolworths was. In fact, the only cultural commentators to have paid Argos any attention, to have held its model of retail up to scrutiny and found it interesting, are comedians.
Michael McIntyre satirised Argos for trying to mount a coup on 1970s retail and failing to notice that other shops weren't imitating it. Bill Bailey based a whole routine on the pathos of the catalogue, the "laminated book of dreams" – plastic-coated to catch people's tears. Even Argos's chief executive says he has heard the shop described as "quirky". To some, Argos is a bit of a joke.
And yet an estimated 18 million UK households have an Argos catalogue; 96% of the population is never further than 10 miles from a store. The particular foibles of the Argos shopping experience may have amused McIntyre and Bailey, but those foibles revolutionised high-street shopping, delivered innovation that even Marks & Spencer and John Lewis copied, and brought to the British public an analogue version of the internet long before the internet, as we know it, was invented.
Bailey would snort at that idea, wouldn't he? Well, no. It is his idea. "Before internet shopping, there was Argos," he says. "I have a great fondness for the place. I've been going all my life. Yes, there's some gaudy jewellery and some dodgy-looking phones. But I don't care. This is pure shopping, point and pay, like an analogue click and buy."
In 1973 Argos even looked a bit like the internet looks now. The contents page of the first catalogue was laid out as a pictorial grid, much like Newser or Buzzfeed: a portal. Like Amazon, Argos was completist, diligently grading and categorising products, a Rolodex of shopping. The jewellery pages from a 1983 catalogue, to give a random illustration, offer six types of plain gold chain, the links of each minutely distinct: venetian, serpentine, foxtail, cobra, trace and curb, belcher. Item descriptions were fetishistically detailed, habitually rounded off with the words "Complete with …", even though this phrase usually turned out to be a voluptuous description for a rather perfunctory feature (camera complete with wrist strap, hair tongs complete with plug). Some of the product names from this period, full of forward slashes, read like a URL: "Gents Scientific Calculator/Chrome/Alarm/LCD watch."
Argos was launched in summer 1973 by Richard Tompkins, the man who had introduced Green Shields stamps to the UK 15 years earlier, and who clearly had an eye for consumer novelty. He died in 1992 but his widow, Elizabeth Tompkins, who still shops at Argos, says she recalls being "invited to go to America to see the new phenomenon of catalogue shopping. We went to Canada and the US and were very impressed." It took a further year to bring Argos to launch and, as a result of that research trip, its shops were not shops but "showrooms". Its points of sale were linked to its warehouses – something that wasn't trialled at Marks & Spencer for a further eight years, and not completed at John Lewis until 1978.
Newspaper advertisements promised a "shopping REVOLUTION!". Argos launched with a show, complete with dancers and specially written songs. It offered a distinct union of self-service shops and catalogues – the convenience of shopping at home, with the face-to-face contact of a local shop.
A was for Argos, the start of something, not least the alphabet. (Like Jeff Bezos at Amazon, Tompkins wanted it to chart early in alphabetical indices.) An editorial in the inaugural staff magazine listed definitions of "Argos". It was "Greek for 'swift'" and "the oldest continuously inhabited town in Europe". A great river, an ancient civilisation – the geography may differ but the declaration of ambition, the motivation by scale, do not.
So why all the laughter?
In 1979, Argos's turnover topped £100m. Its annual turnover to March 2013 was £3,297m. But Argos's parent group, Home Retail, has seen its profits fall from £426m in 2008 to just £130m last year. Argos itself has had a difficult recession. Its overall sales figures have only just started growing again, for the first time in more than five years. From 17 stores at the end of 1973, it now has 735, but 75 of those may close.
Argos on London's Camden High Street is one of the stores in which the chain's hierarchy has selected to test its modernisation programme. Next door is a Lidl, and outside a man is handing out flyers for McDonald's. Here the bestselling item is an own-brand kettle, priced at £5. Inside, a wall clock, portable cassette recorder, dinner set and a Ken Hom wok are waiting at the collection point. A deep-fat fryer is being returned.
Browsing the catalogue on one of the store's newly installed iPads is Harry Wyatt, 23, a medical student. He's wearing Nike trainers and a T-shirt that says: "Work 8 hours. Play 8 hours. Rest 8 hours." He would like to buy a steamer for DIY, and judging by his own classification, he regards it is an emergency. "John Lewis is where I buy for quality. Amazon is for electronics, books, music. Small deliverable goods. Argos is need-them-now goods."
Monica Threlfall is also shopping, flicking the 1,700-page catalogue for a tripod. Her recent Argos purchases include a TV, coffee table, loo seat, kettle, kitchen spotlights, curtain rails and cushions. "Oh, and a fridge!" she says. She is a university lecturer. "In terms of status," she says, "Argos is lower than John Lewis. My friends sometimes joke: 'Argos – your favourite shop!' And it's catalogue shopping, but I think it's very underrated by the professional classes. They think it lacks taste."
John Walden has pale blue eyes – not Argos blue, which he admits to finding "a little cheap" – and a smart suit. He is the Argos chief executive, appointed 18 months ago and charged with taking the store into the digital age. Does he think, like Threlfall's friends, that Argos has an image problem? It's the only time he stumbles. "It's probably among ... potentially ... among some groups, potentially."
From the start, Argos was a value retailer. Its logo has always been red and white, as if perennially shouting "Sale!" or "Christmas!" It is easy to find evidence for a taste problem. The little pens, the forms to fill in, the wait for a number to be called, all echo the paraphernalia of a betting shop, a bingo hall or a long wait in a government building. Despite its best efforts, some of its catalogue styling has been comically off-key: there was always something illicit about those 1980s shots of women dressed in only bikini bottoms, smiling from their sunbeds, the cheesy couples advertising his-and-her robes (his always too short), or the woman demonstrating a home gym in 1995 in a thong leotard, even then at the racy end of leisurewear. In the launch issue, a couple pose in full scuba gear, her with a blowdry, him a harpoon. They look absurdly happy.
But something more basic has given Argos its problem. Threlfall is not a typical shopper. Argos is, predominantly, a store for the less affluent.
When Tompkins launched his brainchild, catalogue use in the UK was peaking. The very term catalogue "would have given a sense of working-class market", says Sean O'Connell, co-author of Mail Order in Britain: a Business and Social History. What Argos did was "to identify a niche for people who wanted to be individual customers" – who found the prospect of a grilling by a department store sales assistant mortifying, but who wanted something more private than the communal consumption of the catalogue, "where your Auntie Kathleen comes round for a cup of tea and three or four women who are neighbours are sitting round making their selections". Argos offered a pathway out of the catalogue experience, gave catalogue consumers a starting point they would recognise and led them into its shops, showed them how to migrate to something better. And as O'Connell says, "that ties in with a lot of the grand narratives about the decline of working-class communities and the rise of individualism in the 1970s and 1980s."
Large numbers of the working class were becoming bank customers for the first time; the less affluent 50% of individuals in Britain were receiving their greatest share of income in history. But it still might be surprising to learn that the most expensive item in Argos's first catalogue was a "brilliant cut 18ct white gold ring set with a brilliant cut diamond", recommended retail price £5,000, Argos price £3,500 – more expensive than the costliest ring in the current catalogue, and at a time when the top 10% of adult men had gross weekly earnings of £60.90.
Perhaps Tompkins hoped for a more affluent customer. After all, his directors persuaded his "apprehensive" wife to give her maiden name to the jewellery line – Elizabeth Duke, with its whiff of aristocracy – or perhaps he wanted to disguise the logic that catalogues were for the less well-off. Or perhaps he just loved diamonds, top of the list of essentials "for yourself, your family, or your home" in the launch ads. In any case, the three carat diamond did not last long. By autumn/winter 1977, Argos's priciest ring cost £200.
If Argos was aspirational, what made it so alluring was that its peculiar shopping system dramatised the redemption of that aspiration. Then, as now, the first act was the catalogue. Suspense grew as the assistant typed in the code: would it be in stock? Then the payment, fulfilment of a sort, and a second slip to take to the collection point. And finally, the wait for your box to arrive from above, wobbling down a conveyor belt or revealed in a dumb waiter – a toaster! – like some brilliant deus ex machina of retail. It is no wonder, really, that Michael McIntyre described this process as a "bizarre theatre for the poor" – at Camden there is a row of (laminated) seats at the collection point, from which to watch. But what McIntyre doesn't say, and perhaps couldn't know, is that it was good theatre.
When I was a child, the Argos catalogue put within reach all kinds of social improvements that could not otherwise be imagined. It wasn't only that Argos supplied such milestones as my first watch (a Timex), first ring (still owned, about 25 years later), first personal stereo (Philips), jewellery box ("with attractive inlaid lid"), camera (the Halina Sharpshooter), hair tongs (Braun Quick Style Duo), electronic typewriter (Smith Corona), the family's first video recorder. It also offered a path to a more affluent lifestyle – the Breville sandwich toaster, with its poshing-up and cafe-ification of the kitchen, and, later, a filter coffee maker. There simply wasn't anywhere else with the breadth and nationwide reach to learn all those things. Argos taught an appreciation for specification, and it put within the flick of a page social signifiers that you knew – even at a young age – suggested something other than what you really were. The glorious possibility, for instance, of one day owning a bale of matching towels, a crystal decanter, a string of pearls.
Walden eschews the idea that Argos is primarily for the less affluent. "The truth is, 70% of households in the UK do business with us; that is distributed pretty equally across socioeconomic groups," he says. His challenge is that some of them shop there only once or twice a year. Terry Duddy, the chief executive of Argos's parent company, Home Retail Group, has spoken about the store's struggles in the recession because of the pinch on its customers. But Walden is not keen on that sort of language. He speaks of "a strategy to become more universally appealing – which basically means, let's carry more of the ranges that are desired by more customer groups". He uses the word "universal" repeatedly as a means of avoiding "class". He would like to encourage "a more universal customer". "Universal" is the opposite of cheap: that Argos turquoise "doesn't feel universal". Why? "It's a good question. I don't know. Maybe I'm egalitarian. I don't like talking about class. I don't want to cater to a certain class. I just want to be good enough for everybody, and good for everybody."
In future, there will be a greater spread of price points. Argos has been cosying up to the internet ever since its logo was redesigned in 2010 when the underlining sweep of its "A" was cut loose and turned into a giant smile. Last month it hired its first digital director. And while the catalogue will still enjoy a supporting role, customers will be encouraged to use digital platforms: already 15% of sales come through mobiles.
A north-east trial is testing the possibility of ordering digitally in the morning and collecting from store the same afternoon, a souped-up Click and Collect, which Argos launched in 2001, eight years before John Lewis. The shopping experience that is recognisably, uniquely Argos is changing. It will look no more like one of those "skeleton" clocks the shop used to sell, its inner workings proudly on show – the stock check, the glimpses of attendants ferrying boxes around, the whir of the mini printer giving them the next order – as if its peculiar mechanism were a wonder of engineering. Soon you will browse, check stock and pay.
In Camden, Sumayyah Fellah thinks the innovations are working. "I like the new changes," she says. "It's really improved, if you know how to use it" – which she clearly does, fingers sliding skilfully over a silky screen. "It's brilliant. And they always have what you want." She is nine years old, and her mum has just bought a piping set.
Retail industryPaula Cocozzatheguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds |
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