Who’s Gone Bust in Retail?

Who’s Gone Bust in UK Retailing in 2019-2020?

Simply Scuba, an award-winning diving retailer based in Faversham, went into administration in June. Thirty-two jobs are at risk. SimplyScuba has won the Dive Retailer of the Year award for ten years in succession. The Simply Group also runs SimplyHike and SimplySwim. The Simply Scuba website continues to trade, with its new 500M Divers Watch on sale today for £109.

Please Note also: the figures given above for every year refer ONLY to UK failures and ONLY to UK retail businesses - so not to American or Australian corporations, not to restaurants, cafes and food services, not to U.S. department stores - some of which are mentioned on this webpage. The yearly totals in the Table above are intended to show the main trends applying to UK retailing, from relatively benign years where few companies go bust to perfectly horrid years like this one. So far (to July 2020) of the stores' at risk', 53% or 1,424 have been closed and 43.7% of 'at risk' staff have been made redundant. The equivalent figures last year were 36.9% and 20.6% respectively,

By end-June 2020 more bricks-and-mortar retailers had gone into administration, putting more stores at risk and more employees under threat of losing their jobs, than in the whole of 2019. 2019 was described bby some some observers as 'the worst year for 25 years' for the industry .

What’s Included and Excluded?

We have published these lists of medium and large UK retailers that have gone bust (ie entered ‘administration’ to seek protection from creditors or gone into liquidation) for more than 17 years.

Business failure can often be a temporary inconvenience. We are not suggesting that the businesses listed here no longer survive, but they have gone through the legal process of insolvency known as administration. This listing is based on research carried out at the time based on our understanding of their business affairs. More recent information may well change some of the assumptions or conclusions. Some of these firms entered administration and then were closed down. Others have had a second life as ecommerce-only businesses with no or few physical stores. Most of the large firms came out of administration and are still trading. Some have been sold, but changed their name. Others exist as departments or concessions in larger stores. The presence of any business in this listing must not be taken to imply that it no longer exists, its name is no longer used or that such business, if still trading, is impaired in anyway.