BRITAIN’S biggest toy chain has launched a 25% closing down sale at a store closing in a matter of days.
The Entertainer at The Moor Shopping Centre in Sheffield will close on Saturday, October 11, according to the shopping centre’s announcement.
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The ‘everything must go’ sale slashes prices on tonnes of items by up to a quarter – excluding gift cards, Lego, VTech and LeapFrog products.
Shoppers are gutted about the shop disappearing, with one social media user saying: “And another one gone.”
Savers Health and Beauty Ltd have put in a planning application for the building, with designs for a new sign on the building already drawn up.
This is only The Entertainer’s latest loss this year with closures including outlets in Barrow-in-Furness, Croydon, Luton and Wandsworth.
It comes as The Entertainer last week revealed a massive change to opening hours in a move which will create 200 new jobs.
For the first time in the toy shop’s history it will open on Sundays.
Husband and wife founders Gary and Catherine Grant handed the company’s ownership to its 1,900 employees in August.
They put the family business in the hands of an employee-run board, nearly 45 years after opening their first shop in Amersham, Buckinghamshire.
In the year to January 2024, The Entertainer’s annual pre-tax profits fell 18% to £6.7million as sales dipped 3.7% to £238.3million.
It remains the UK’s largest toy shop chain with 160 stores nationwide, according to its website.
The UK toy market was up eight per cent in value in the year to June, according to recent data.
However, this is just one positive sign in an otherwise grim market for many high street retailers.
The British retail sector has been struggling ever since the 2008 financial crash – described as a “permacrisis” by experts.
The pandemic and cost-of-living crisis dealt fresh blows to the struggling industry, which hasn’t recovered since.
Online shopping has also hit the high streets hard, with 34 chain retailers packing up in 2024 alone.
Those store closures affected 7,537 shops and 55,914 employees in 2024 alone, according to the Centre for Retail Research.
In 2024, retail sales in Great Britain were worth £517 billion, an increase of 1.4% on 2023.
But despite this slight recent growth, retail sales remain well below pre-pandemic levels.
Over the same period, internet sales have skyrocketed from 19.5% to 27.6% of all retail sales, according to the Office for National Statistics.
RETAIL PAIN IN 2025
The British Retail Consortium has predicted that the Treasury’s hike to employer NICs will cost the retail sector £2.3billion.
Research by the British Chambers of Commerce shows that more than half of companies plan to raise prices by early April.
A survey of more than 4,800 firms found that 55% expect prices to increase in the next three months, up from 39% in a similar poll conducted in the latter half of 2024.
Three-quarters of companies cited the cost of employing people as their primary financial pressure.
The Centre for Retail Research (CRR) has also warned that around 17,350 retail sites are expected to shut down this year.
It comes on the back of a tough 2024 when 13,000 shops closed their doors for good, already a 28% increase on the previous year.
Professor Joshua Bamfield, director of the CRR said: “The results for 2024 show that although the outcomes for store closures overall were not as poor as in either 2020 or 2022, they are still disconcerting, with worse set to come in 2025.”
Professor Bamfield has also warned of a bleak outlook for 2025, predicting that as many as 202,000 jobs could be lost in the sector.
“By increasing both the costs of running stores and the costs on each consumer’s household it is highly likely that we will see retail job losses eclipse the height of the pandemic in 2020.”
