Former Wilko boss ‘not surprised’ by collapse of retailer

ODN

Gordon Brown, the former managing director of Wilko, has admitted he is “not surprised” by the collapse of the high street chain. The retailer announced it was going into administration on Thursday, putting around 12,000 jobs at risk across the nation.     Report by Ajagbef. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn

Transcript

00:00 Sadly, it's not a surprise. I think the writing's been on the wall for the last few weeks and

00:07 the management team there have been working very hard to avoid it, but sadly this morning

00:11 that's not been the case. I feel very sorry for the 12,000 staff that are there and who

00:17 have worked very hard for the company, many of them very long service employees, many

00:23 still there that were there when I was there. And I feel very sorry for them because they

00:28 do work hard, they're a dedicated team and it's great sympathy for them in this difficult

00:34 time. I think it was treated very much as a family business. The family were deeply

00:40 involved. J.K., the founder, who founded the business in 1930, was very active in the business

00:46 right through to the time he passed. And Tony, his son, was always active in the company.

00:52 He visited the stores. In fact, he made a point of visiting every store every year,

00:57 not to find out what was going wrong, but really to find out what the people, the staff

01:02 felt, what the customers felt, and he'd feed that back to us. So it was that type of close

01:08 family relationship that existed during that period of time.

Category

Transcript

Recommended