A British supermarket that was a familiar fixture on the nation's high streets for nearly 50 years finally closed its doors after struggling to survive after the big supermarkets introduced their own brands.
Kwik Save, with its familiar logo of white block italics against a red background, grew to become a common site in Britain after the first store opened in Rhyl in 1959. The business adopted the model of successful continental supermarkets like Aldi and Lidl, buying a limited range of goods on favourable payment terms.
The supermarket was also famous for its 'No Frills' line of own brand, cheaper generic products. The same idea was later taken up by all the major supermarket chains which became a significant factor in its downfall.
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The chain continued to expand, and by the mid-1990s, they had more than 800 stores spanning the country with Liverpool's most prominent Kwik Save store on Hanover Street in Liverpool city centre. The stores were primarily aimed at the lower end of the market, keeping costs down with wooden shelving and shop fittings and basic checkout areas.
In the early years, the stores had little in the way of competition and had found favour with customers looking to save money away from the larger, mainstream supermarkets. In the 1980s, the stores started selling frozen food for the first time.
It was in the 1990s that chain run a TV advert starring Michael Barrymore promoting the Kwik Save Freephone Helpline, which people could call if they wanted to report prices cheaper elsewhere. They ended with the slogan "Kwik Save – Because we're cheap, you're cheerful!"
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There was also an off-license section of many Kwik Save stores known as Liquorsave and the butchery counters were usually run by local franchises under the name Colemans. In 1994, Kwik Save acquired 117 new stores from Shoprite, a fellow food discounter.
This rapid expansion was later acknowledged to have been a contributing factor which led financial problems and the closure of 107 underperforming stores. In 1998 the chain was bought out by supermarket rival Somerfield.
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An effort was made to modernise the look of the budget supermarket following the the takeover to fall in line with the higher-end looking Somerfield stores. However, the chain struggled to make money during the '00s as the big supermarkets like Asda, Tesco and Sainsbury's introduced their own budget brands.
It was also the time when the original foreign discount supermarkets such as Aldi, Lidl and Netto - who all arrived in the UK in the 1990s - began to expand. In 2007, Kwik Save said it was to close 79 of its stores with immediate effect.
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A month later it announced plans to close a further 20 stores to keep the company from going into administration. But the closure didn't have the desired effect and the company went into administration soon after.
The 56 remaining Kwik Save were sold to a new company, FreshXpress, which itself went into administration in March 2008. All those stores have now since closed.
In April 2012, the Kwik Save brand was relaunched by new owners Costcutter as a more budget oriented fascia offering to members of its franchise group of independently owned convenience stores. The first new Kwik Save store opened in Bolton in 2012 but has since become a Spar.
Do these awaken any memories for you? Let us know in the comments section below.
And if you've got an old Kwik Save bag stuffed in the back of a kitchen drawer, you might want to carefully fish it out. These days, a Kwik Save bag in good condition will fetch over £20 on auction site eBay.
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