Dixons

The Birth and Death of Dixons Southend High Street was famous for two Dixons stores. One was much bigger than the other but you could say the other became much bigger than the other. The first Dixons was a department store which was located at the entrance to the High Street at the Southchurch Road junction. This was huge department store that provided everything for every-man and woman. J. L. Dixons was established in 1913 and 60 years later in 1973, closed up shop, the site was later taken by W. H. Smiths who are still there today. The other Dixons started in 1937 in a much smaller location as a camera shop. Dixons was to become the largest and most well known High Street electrical retailer in the country. The store started at 32 High Street, and later moved northwards up the the same road due to the building of the new style shopping centre 'The Royals' This is the story as written by the BBC News in 2006

Southend-on-Sea

R.I.P. Dixons DIXONS, as familiar a sight to shoppers as the TV sets in the corners of their living rooms, has had its plug pulled. Its circuits fried, its batteries failed, its tube blown. Lights will start going out soon in the illuminated fascias at 190 branches, though it is not known if the company took out extended warranties on the signs. Dixons is survived by its internet arm; High Street branches will be renamed "Currys digital," a development not expected to please Lynne Truss. Born in 1937, Dixons' earliest days were spent at the seaside, in Southend, when fatherly Charles Kalms chose the name for his new offspring by picking the name from a telephone directory (it fitted above the door). Appropriately its address was 32 High Street - and over the next 70 years the name became almost the definition of mass High Street retailing, though this was not always a good thing. Many people, including English Heritage, attacked the rise of so-called "Clone Towns" where chains stores made every High Street look the same. Current boss John Clare predicted some customers might feel nostalgic that the name would be disappearing. And indeed many gadget/appliance-loving Brits will have first dipped their toes into the culture of consumerism at a branch of the shop. But Dixons was not universally popular. In 2004, the Financial Times said that the shop's staff "have, perhaps unfairly, engendered a new social stereotype - the spotty youth who sneers at the technically challenged customer." Clare himself replied there were indeed probably too many spotty youths, but that staff were trained not to sneer. Friends might have foreseen the decline of the Dixons name when the company said it was no longer stocking 35mm cameras. That icon of 1980s gadgets, the VHS recorder, came next. And now Dixons has followed countless gadgets into obsolescence.

First Dixons

Second Dixons later to become Currys Digital