It takes a certain sort of person to brave Primark on Market Street in Manchester on a Saturday afternoon. When the queues for the tills can get THAT long they snake across the sprawling department store’s ground floor and practically spill out onto Piccadilly Gardens itself.
To be clear, I am not that sort of person. Oh no, I have headed to Manchester’s original Primark store on a Tuesday morning thinking things will be a bit quieter then.
But it turns out Primark on Market Street is never “a bit quiet”.
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I admit I've never been much of a Primark devotee. But swelteringly hot as Manchester is right now, I was lured in to the Market Street store by the dazzling rainbow of strappy ladies vests priced at a ridiculously cheap price of £2.50.
And clearly half of Manchester is regularly lured in here too. For while there have been mixed fortunes and big losses across the nation’s high streets since the pandemic lockdowns, Primark is one business that is evidently booming since restrictions eased.
The cheaper-than-chips retailer has seen sales rise by 15 per cent in stores across the UK last year, with operating profits reported to be around £700million. Now I’m no maths genius, but to make that kind of money when t-shirts are being sold for £2.50 a time means this company is shifting some serious amounts of stock.
Needless to say, everything in store feels designed to encourage you to buy more, more, more. I mean, you don't just pick up a regular sized basket on your way in, it's a humongous grey sack that seemingly everyone drags around the store - and plenty are stuffed full to the brim.
It's not a "five items or less" rule in the changing rooms here - oh no, signs assure you "there are no limits". They want you to try as many items as you can feasibly juggle under your armpit and over your shoulder.
And at the tills on the way out? Signs with the hashtag "#Primania" - encouraging you to share pics on your Insta, TikTok and Snapchat of all your frenzied shopping haul.
Thousands upon thousands of people are enthusiastically shopping here at the Market Street store seven days a week. It is one of the biggest Primarks in the country with 155,000 square foot of shopping space spread across three huge floors of the iconic former Lewis’ building, conveniently located right next to the tram stop.
But I'm agog at how busy it is compared to many of the other big retailers in town on a Tuesday lunchtime - it's eerily quiet in M&S further down Market Street, and practically tumbleweed at Kendals on the same day.
Once inside Primark, and having selected a few of the vests to try as well as some other fashion items that took my fancy, I saw the first of what would be many queues. A mix of men and women snaking in a long line outside the ground floor unisex changing rooms just before 12noon on a Tuesday.
Heart sinking, I see that the adjacent Friends-themed Central Perk cafe is miraculously the one thing not busy inside Primark, so I decide to take a pitstop before I brave the changing rooms and head to the loo. Oh, except I'm immediately stopped from using the loo - "This is only for cafe customers, Primark loos are on floor one", I'm curtly told.
"If I buy a coffee can I have a wee?" I ask. "Yes, the code for the toilets is on your receipt," I'm informed.
So I pay £2.55 for a coffee (yes, more than a strappy Primark vest) just so I can unlock the door to the loo. In fairness, it's a very clean loo so was almost worth the investment.
Having slurped down the coffee in the cafe and hummed along to the Friends theme tune on repeat, I'm left with the prospect of the changing room queue again though. So I join the back, and patiently queue for 10 minutes here to try on the vests and a unitard that is apparently the must-have fashion item at Primark right now.
Annoyingly, I love them all. So that means joining the vast, growing queues at the tills on the ground floor.
Now when I first arrived in store, I couldn't work out why both banks of tills (they're sort of split by a central corridor) weren't in operation. It appears some sort of tipping point must happen when staff decide the whole lot will open - which is reached by 12.30pm on my visit.
It's getting so busy now in the store that the queues are snaking back on either side and I feel a bit stressed about how long this is all going to take.
So I ask a friendly shopping assistant if I'm better off paying on another floor instead. She laughs: "We always get asked that, but I'm afraid they’re all the same - they’re all as busy as each other.”
So I spent 10 minutes in a queue to get into the changing rooms, and then another 20 minutes in the vast queue at the tills on the ground floor to pay. When I finally got to the front I asked the smiley till assistant: “Is it always this busy?”
He laughed and his eyes widened: "Busy? This is CALM. You should come on a Saturday - the queues are literally through the store and out the door.”
It appears I got off quite lightly with my 30 minutes of total queuing here on my Tuesday visit. For a quick look on TripAdvisor reveals the Primark queues are annoying plenty of shoppers in Manchester, and everyone has an opinion on how they could be better managed.
Recent reviews on TripAdvisor include the ominously titled: “I will never like this place”... “The queues will put you off” and “This place made me cry”.
The most recent, titled: “Avoid if you want to be quick”, details a visitor’s painful experience with the queues.
Debbie S from Manchester wrote: “Terrible. Nipped in on my dinner hour hoping I'd be able to grab a few bits. Loads of staff on the shop floor busy doing nothing. One shepherding people into the massive queue.
"He'd be more help if he just jumped on a till and did some actual work. My tip is if you have someone with you get them to stand in the queue then join them when you've got your items.”
Now this is not a bad tip from Debbie - although I did see someone doing exactly that on my visit with a cheeky passing of jogging pants and neon bras to a comrade in the queues. But oh, you should have seen the death stares and the tuts they got from the shoppers behind me.
Back on Tripadvisor, reviewer Two-Way-Ticket wrote: "I don't want to give a 1 star but Wow!!!! Its a massive store, hardly any shop floor staff, and if you have time a queue to pay is around a week long. How can you quickly pop in to get something from in there.
"I was popping up to Manchester to see friends Vs spending the whole day paying for 1 thing. With your store so big, surely you need more options to pay, more staff, self service.
"Birmingham store is very big but they don't have this problem from the times I've been there. You seem to have more security on the doors than workers."
They ended the review with the stinging: "Recommend you book holiday leave to visit this place.”
Well, come on, the queues aren’t quite holiday leave length but I do get their point - it's hard to think of any other Manchester store where you have to queue up for quite such a long time even mid-week. So I asked Primark for a comment on the queues in Manchester, and what measures were in place to help ease the flow of their clearly very enthusiastic customer base.
A Primark spokesperson responded: "We’re really sorry that some of our Manchester customers have experienced long queues. We want all our customers to have a good experience in our stores and wherever possible we put in place measures to curb queues, which include opening more tills."
I'm amazed that those big queues at the tills are not putting people off. But then, the appeal of those bargain basement prices is strong.
I mean, where else in town can you snap up an entire pack of colouring pencils for 80p? Or fake eyelashes for £1.80? Or even a candle with the word "Manifest" down the side for £3.50?
For those troubled by the rampant consumerism of it all, there’s always the Wornwell department with vintage clothing that recently launched inside this Primark at the Piccadilly Gardens end. Here you can pick up items like "vintage" Adidas jumpers for £30. Funnily enough there isn’t a queue to buy stuff in this bit on my visit.
There are also adverts for customisation workshops in store to “revamp your pre-loved clothes” - in a bid to encourage people to recycle I assume, rather than mindlessly consume more new stuff. The sign is right next to racks and racks of £4 t-shirts and £15 trousers - and on into the sea of every possible item of new clothing you could ever possibly wish for.
There really is just so much of everything, everywhere. To the Primark staff's credit, on my visit everything is looking clean and well-organised around the Market Street store which is some feat given the scale of this operation.
There’s a travel shop with luggage, there's loads of jewellery, a brightly lit beauty section and then up on floor one a vast homeware section, as well as all the clothing. You can even pick up laundry liquid here for £3.50. The basement is for menswear and the ever-popular childrenswear department.
Primark is also the great leveller - there's no one demographic of shopper here. There's pretty much all of society - young and old, men and women, trendy young things and elderly shufflers (I probably fall in the latter bracket). You’re dodging pram wheels as much as OAP shopping trolleys at every turn.
I spot one well-dressed mum with a Chanel carrier bag in the bottom of her designer Egg pram queuing with the rest of us to buy a pile of cheap baby clothes. I ask her what's the appeal of this place to her and she sums it up like this: "For kids' stuff it can't be beaten, because babies are only going to grow out of it in a couple of months anyway so you don't need brilliant quality, it's just such good value for money."
Worth a half hour queue, I ask? "Well, yes I'd forgotten about the queues," she laughed.
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