Save Our Woolies!

Today this blog launches a campaign to save a national treasure - Woolworths.


The Save Our Woolies campaign (SOW) is calling on the British public to dig deep to safeguard one of the greatest stores ever.

I have visited the Lewes branch of Woolworths - on Cliffe High Street - three times in the few days since the news of its imminent demise broke like at thunderclap over small town land.

More than 50 quid has been spent by me on items I had always fancied but could never really justify buying before.



Today - Saturday - Woolworths in Lewes was mobbed by customers.

The queues were as long as the staff's faces. The store was running out of stock.

It occurred to me that the public really could save Woolworths simply by buying a great chunk of their Christmas presents there.

One thing's for sure - our pathetic government could not give a fig.

For the price of a few newly nationalised banks' chief executives' salaries, the government could have helped Woolies through this crisis.

Yet they would rather see it go to the wall, throwing the already hard-up staff on to the dole queue and causing more boarded up empty properties or crappy pound shops on the high street.

This of a brand that has served the poorest members of the British public - and the rest of us - well since it was imported from the USA in 1909 when everything was priced at sixpence. (Frank Woolworth opened the first Woolworths in Pennsylvania in 1879).

And all the while, Mandy (Peter Mandelson) is drawing up a list of companies he is willing to save.

So, join SOW! Spend, spend, spend - until Woolworths finds a saviour.

Don't let Woolies die...