‘I’ll never say I’m popping to Jones’s’: shoppers yet to feel love for WH Smith’s high street replacement

Shopper Jon Wright, outside the TG Jones store in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, says the brand ‘doesn’t really know what it is’ . Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Guardian

“It’s just the same.” Six months on from the sale of WH Smith’s high street business, the name above the door may have changed to TG Jones, but many shoppers have not noticed a splurge of investment or change.

“The layout is the same and what they are selling is the same,” says Gillian Parsons as she exits TG Jones on a busy high street in the market town of Hitchin, Hertfordshire, where a steady flow of visitors are picking up cards, wrapping paper and the odd present in the week before Christmas.