SHOPPING:Everyone loves a bargain, but not everyone wants a bargain shop opening next door to them, especially in the rarified surroundings of St Stephen's Green. ROISIN INGLEvisits the new EuroGiant next door to James Adam and Sons auction rooms
IT’S FRIDAY LUNCHTIME on one of the most prestigious streets in Dublin, that grand stretch of road book-ended by the Shelbourne Hotel and the St Stephen’s Green Club. Strolling along the Green you pass Peploe’s restaurant, the newly-opened Little Museum of Dublin and James Adam and Sons auction rooms.
Next door to the auctioneers, where a Yeats painting recently sold for €1 million, is the street’s latest occupant, a discount store called EuroGiant. In this less-established establishment, one can find a large artist’s canvas for €2 and a paint palette for €1.
“It does seem a bit out of place in this area,” muses one customer who works for a well-known stockbroker. She is on a mission to buy cheap decorations for her office Christmas party. “I suppose it’s a sign of the times.”
The store opened five weeks ago and is already proving popular with everyone from students picking up cheap bags of branded sweets to civil servants having a good look around in their lunch break. The sign above the door is, with a nod to the upmarket location, restrained. Inside, the signage is reminiscent of low-cost airlines. There’s a simple, two-colour yellow and blue design scheme, with signs drawing attention to the prices, which range from €1 to €2.
The single-price retail concept been around for more than 100 years, beginning in the US with five and dime stores. These days it represents huge business in the US. Between them three companies – Dollar Tree, Dollar General and Family Dollar – operate 20,000 stores in the US with sales of $25 billion. Similar stores do a roaring trade in the UK.
In Ireland, EuroGiant, formerly Euro2, has spent much of the year in expansion mode, opening bigger and brighter stores around the country. But it is not the only player in this increasingly crowded sector. Earlier this year two UK chains, 99p – operating here as Euro Fifty – and Dealz, which operates in the UK as Poundland, entered the Irish cut-price market. Retail experts say the rise of the discount store was to be expected given the economic downturn, the reduced spend by consumers and the more favourable rents being offered by landlords faced with thousands of empty retail premises around the country.
The range at the St Stephen’s Green branch is is extensive and eclectic – toaster bags here, a lap top cover there – and none of the 4,000 products stocked will cost you more than €2. Bicycle couriers linger over the technology section where they can get lights, batteries and USB cables for a fifth of the price it would cost them elsewhere. Parents on their lunch break scan the shelves for birthday party paraphernalia and toys.
One woman is humming and hawing over an ironing board cover as though she was contemplating a property investment rather than handing over €2 for a flowery piece of material. She walks away, still unsure, although hardly anyone seems to leave the store empty handed.
David Tisdall, who works in the Department of Agriculture, is heading to the tills clutching a solar panel key ring light. “It will be helpful when I am opening the door in the dark,” he says. This is an item to be filed in the Things I Didn’t Know I Needed category, which forms a large part of the allure of discount stores. In the same vein, there is a lighter in the shape of a giant match (€2), which is calling to this writer, a regular discount store shopper.
In the next few weeks EuroGiant stores expect to shift a million metres of wrapping paper, 600,000 candy canes and 50,000 Santa hats. While Halloween and Christmas are two of the busiest times, demand for everyday goods is strong, too. It sells 10 million greeting cards a year, for example.
Discount stores carry an increasingly varied range of branded items that are hugely popular, but it appears pretty much everything will sell at these prices. Usually the stores have pregnancy tests for €2, which are “really popular” according to area manager Cathy Sallinger, but on this visit they are sold out. The shop also sells condoms, but these are also out of stock.
The branded items range from large Toblerones (€1) to Fairy washing-up liquid (€1) and packs of Kodak blank DVDs (€2). There are also lots of knick knacks – scented candles, money boxes and euro-decorated loo roll and tissues. So while you may not have a spare 50 cent, you can still wipe your nose or your bottom with a fake one.
Not surprisingly, the location of this store means it is attracting a fair few discount-store virgins. Chartered accountant Margaret Ayers is on her way to a conference in the National Library and has popped in on a whim, having never set foot in a store like this before.
“It does seem out of place in this area, perhaps the rent is lower or something. I have to say my perceptions of these places would have been that they were grubby and grotty and full of tat, but this is bright and clean and . . .” She doesn’t finish her sentence because she is distracted suddenly by the sight of the same branded smokers’ toothpaste her husband uses and which she usually pays €3.75 for. “It’s €1.50,” she says. “That’s amazing.”
While in the boom some people revelled in splashing cash, she believes being seen to shop at this rock-bottom end of the retail market is now something of a badge of honour. Ayers was talking to friends recently who were “horrified” to discover she had never shopped in Aldi.
“It’s as though it’s more chic to shop in cheaper places now,” she says, before rushing off to her conference and promising to return, stunned as she is by how many branded items are available. This is before she has even seen the one litre bottles of San Pellegrino mineral water for €1.
In Britain, the increase in middle-class shoppers at discount stores has led to some chains expanding their range to include goods such as extra virgin olive oil and pesto. When I mention this, Sallinger goes out the back and returns with a new item, ready to be put on the shelves, a bottle of balsamic vinegar. It’s the Heinz brand and the Chinese script on the bottle shows it wasn’t originally made for this market, but it’s indicative of how owner Charlie O’Loughlin is planning to further expand the product range in the future.
O’Loughlin opened his first Pound Store on Moore Street in 1990. The newly rebranded EuroGiant now has 60 stores around the country, 600 staff and annual sales of €70 million. At 650 sq m, the Northside Shopping Centre store is the largest in the country, and on a Friday afternoon it’s packed, with a constant queue for the till. O’Loughlin says a third of the produce is sourced in Ireland, a third in the UK and the remaining third in the “rest of the world”. One of the biggest sellers is the colour catcher, a product made in Cork that stops dye running in clothes in the washing machine. The company sells 400,000 of these each year.
While the perception might be that these stores are coining it, O’Loughlin says that business is tough for all retailers, including him. “What we find is that we are getting a bigger percentage of the people on the street, but there are less of them, we trade off traffic flow and if that drops then business drops.”
Given the St Stephen’s Green location, you’d expect many customers to be wearing suits and sure enough they are here, feeling the quality of tea towels or nabbing three family boxes of tissues for €1.50. One of the suits, a man called Kevin, is holding a large bottle of window screen cleaning fluid and an artist’s palette and brush set. “The cleaning stuff is great value for that price, and my wife is decorating a large dolls house so this is perfect,” he says.
Is he surprised to find a store like this in such a high-end location? “I think it’s pretty obvious that in a recession shops like these will do well,” he says. “It’s very strategically located and you can see how there’d be a temptation to pop in as you pass by on the way to work.” He says he will be going back to his office and letting his colleagues know about the bargains to be had. So where does he work? “The Department of Finance.” At this rate, we shouldn’t be surprised to find the IMF ducking in here when it runs out of batteries.
Just before the store opened, this newspaper asked James O’Halloran, managing director of James Adam and Sons auctioneers, what he thought of his soon-to-be neighbour. He said it was “entirely inappropriate” for this type of business to operate here. At the time, the auctioneers had just sold the last lot from Slane Castle, including a Ming plate for €310,000 “and a reporter rang wondering if we’d heard about the pound store going in beside us.
“I couldn’t believe it,” O’Halloran says. “I didn’t think it was a good fit for this stretch of the Green. While I still believe that I’d much prefer to see somebody operating a business that is bringing people past our front door. It doesn’t seem particularly gaudy to me, it’s well lit up and they are selling things that people want.”
He admits that his experience of pound shops is limited. “I can hand on heart say I don’t think I’ve ever been in one,” he says. Hearing this, I can’t resist bringing him from the hushed antiques show room to the EuroGiant next door. As we go in, he says the store is already popular with the staff in his office. He heard from them that you can get two cans of branded soft drinks for €2. In fact you can get five cans for €2.
This, he finds “quite amazing”. After 10 minutes in the store he is won over. EuroGiant boss Charlie O’Loughlin says the store brings life to a unit that was vacant for seven years, and describes the store as a “beacon of light in what was previously a dark section of the street”.
O’Halloran seems to agree, up to a point. “This store was unoccupied for so long that it was like a black tooth in a row of shiny white ones,” he says, apparently coming round to the idea that a discount store and one of the poshest firms in the country can coexist happily next door to each other. Or maybe he is just relieved it wasn’t one of O’Loughlin’s UK competitors who moved in.
“It could have been a 99 cent store, and that would have been a lot worse,” he smiles.
