A budget supermarket chain that started off on a British high street finally closed its doors after retail giants like Tesco and Asda introduced their own budget range of goods.
Kwik Save, with its instantly recognisable red and white branding, was a common sight on the nation's high streets for nearly 50-years. After the foundations of the brand were started by Welsh entrepreneur Albert Gubay in 1959, the first recognisable Kwik Save store opened in North Wales in 1965.
Famous for its 'No Frills' line of own brand food staples, the idea would be later copied by supermarket giants like Tesco, Asda and Sainsbury's. The business also adopted the successful European retail model similar to Aldi and Lidl, buying in a limited range of goods on favourable payment terms.
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Throughout the 1970s and '80s, supermarkets began to take over the UK, offering everything that smaller retailers did but all under one roof. By the late 1980s, British shoppers were confronted with a bewildering choice of giant superstores such as Tesco and Sainsbury's, often built on the outskirts of town.
Unable to compete with the giants, Kwik Save took the opportunity to move into areas where traditional grocery retailers had abandoned, such as town centres and residential areas. By the mid-1990s, there were more than 800 Kwik Save stores across Britain including the high streets of Greater Manchester.
With its cheap and cheerful image, the stores had little in the way of competition and attracted customers looking to save money away from the larger, mainstream supermarkets. In the 1980s, the stores also 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.
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 ranges.
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.
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.
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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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