WHSmith has sold its UK High Street business to Modella Capital.
But… it did not pass on the name. So a new name, TGJones, has been created for High Street shops.
I assume most of us associate the name WHSmith as a UK High Street newsagent (shop=newsagent). It appears in recent years the importance of these shops to WHSmith has declined, with 80 to 90% of its profit now coming from “Travel Retail” shops. That is shops located globally in Travel hubs (Airports, Train Stations, Motorway Service Stations, etc).
So WHSmith decided to sell of its UK High Street business. WHSmith does still exist, but are in or associated with Travel Hubs (and some other busy locations (hospitals?)).
We need to correct the tagging for TGJones shops. But we need to be wary that WHSmith still exists. A quick Overpass search suggests the following are the tags that need to be looked at.
name
brand
brand:wikidata
brand:wikipedia
operator
website
check_date
This is also a chance to attemp to agree on what type of shop they are? Currently mainly tagged as books or newsagent.
WHSmith sold their high street book/stationery shops to TG Jones High Street Limited, but have kept their travel outlets. The former will be re-branded as “TGJones”, but right now I think most are still branded as WHSmith.
Until they get re-branded, there’s not much to be done in terms of OSM tagging. Although to help with any subsequent re-tagging it would perhaps be useful to be able to tag the current WHSmith branded shops as either the high street store type (that will be changing to TGJones soon) or the travel type (which will be staying as WHSmith).
Perhaps operator=* would be the best way to do this. The former being operated by “TG Jones High Street Ltd”, the latter by “WH Smith PLC”. The websites for the former have now transferred to the TGJones website, so those could be added too.
My Chain Reaction page for WHSmith uses old data from before the split, but I think only lists the high street stores that are re-branding. So the entries in the “OSM Objects not matched to list” table are more likely to be travel shops that will be staying as WHSmith. So these might be useful lists to work from.
In my local area the shops have been re-branded, in the week after the 1st August. I assumed nationaly it would take time to physically change the store signage, but online searches imply it is happening quickly.
The shops have TGJones signage, TGJones website, adverstise as TGJones, and advertise jobs asTGJones. I’ve made changes to TGJones stores I know of.
Unfortunately, as you said, WHSmiths does not have a list of stores it’s retaining.
And, usual, thanks for the great work you do with the great tools you make available and the work it entails.
Thanks to the work of @TheUKHighStreet at AllThePlaces, we now have a TGJones spider to collect the store details.
I’ve taken the output and run it through my Chain Reaction tool. Since many (most?) of the stores are still showing WHSmith branding, I’ve including both the WHSmith and TGJones brand:wikidata tags when comparing with OSM. To allow us to remove the travel shops that will be staying as WHSmith from the comparison, I exclude any objects tagged with brand:website=https://www.whsmithplc.co.uk/ . (That seems to be reasonable tagging, since those stores now don’t have store-specific pages.) I’ve been through and added that tag to any locations that are obviously travel stores (i.e. in airports, train stations, motorway servies and hospitals).
A couple of things that we could do with now if anyone has the expertise:
The TGJones storefinder includes some previous “British Bookshops” stores e.g. British Bookshop & Stationers, 9 North Street, Chichester (see here for history). I don’t know whether these will remain under that brand in the future, but if they do, it would be good if the ATP spider could distinguish them.
We should get a Name Suggestion Index entries set up for TGJones, to help ensure the brand:wikidata tag is added for stores converting to TGJones. This could just mirror the existing WHSmith entries, but perhaps we should have some discussion about what shop=* values are most appropriate for the high street stores.
Currently shop=newsagent and shop=books are allowed by NSI. I think newsagent probably isn’t appropriate for the high street stores. Is books the best option, or would stationery be better?
It might be beyond the NSI’s capabilities, but the best option is surely “whatever it was previously mapped as, unless the customer offer has changed under the new management”?
Different WHS branches always used to have a different balance of goods on sale (depending, for example, on whether there was a “proper” bookshop locally). If someone thought that one was previously a newsagent (or bookshop) I wouldn’t retag that just because the name has changed. There will always be a bit of genre overlap with shops like this.
Though I think for WHSmith, NSI allowed shop=books or shop=newsagent, and actively ‘corrected’ shop=stationery to the latter. So it’s likely that quite a few of the shop=newsagent tags on WHSmith stores are NSI’s doing rather than an active choice by editors.
Notably the Stockport WH Smiths has not been re-branded, although it’s definitely showing up on the TGJones website. Is standard practice to leave this as the old name until the physical signage is changed?
The WHSmith “Travel” outlets at airports, service stations and (probably most) railway stations were not sold, and are continuing under the WHSmith brand. All the traditional high street stores were sold, and (I imagine) will either be re-branded shortly or closed.
The TGJones website listed all the high street stores straight away after the sale went through, despite almost none of them having been re-branded at that point. So it’s to be expected that any high street stores that still haven’t been re-branded (for whatever reason) will be listed there.
For the time being my Chains comparison for TGJones also includes OSM objects with brand:wikidata=Q1548712 for stores still branded as WHSmith, but then excludes any tagged with brand:website=https://www.whsmithplc.co.uk/ which can be used to mark the retained travel shops.