In fairness, The Entertainer have relatively compact stores (rather than the warehouse-sized Toys'r'Us megastores).
Plus they do put on a level of entertainment - there's often a member of staff at the door "demonstrating" a toy, which makes it quite a fun retail experience, somewhere that kids want to visit. Little touches too, like the steps at the till, so that kids can step up and pay for their toys themselves, colourful shops.
If you gave a kid the option of The Entertainer versus Argos/ Tesco then they'd go for the former.
I’m still astonished WH Smith has survived for as long as it has.
Agreed.
WH Smith is in that awkward middle ground where it's not really best at anything. If I want a bookshop I go to Waterstones. If I want a stationers I go to Rymans/ Staples. If I want specialist information I go online, rather than buying a magazine that was published the previous week. If I want a magazine/ newspaper then they cost the same at other shops, so there's no advantage to Smiths. If I want toys or DVDs then there are much better retailers for those things too.
As I said on the Toys'r'Us thread, there's a danger to being in the middle ground, where you aren't the first choice destination for anything. Toys'r'Us weren't as cheap as Amazon or as fun as The Entertainer or as convenient as the large toy selection in large supermarkets.
BHS weren't as cheap as Primark or as upmarket as M&S or as specialist as a Long Tall Sally/ Evans/ Jacamo (etc).
JJB closed because they were caught up in the middle of Sports Direct (cheap), JD (trendy), Go Outdoors/ Decathlon/Blacks (specialist equipment).
To succeed, you need to be the best at something - however niche - once customers are inside your shop then they'll likely pick up other things - you need to give people a reason to visit, rather than just being there. Nobody would go out of their way to somewhere like BHS/ JJB, which is why they eventually failed.
Boots is fairly middle ground - not as cheap as Superdrug/ Savers/ Bodycare and not as luxurious as some specialist "beauty" places (e.g. in department stores) - they have to rent some huge retail space for their shops but a lot of it is filled with things like sandwiches and gifts as it becomes harder to stay competitive in the "shampoo" market.
I can see Waterstones/ HMV surviving, simply because they are the last shops in town to do what they do - they are the best bookshop/ record shop because they are the only bookshop/ record shop - so at least there's a need to visit.
Maybe the next one will be Mothercare - since a lot of kids things can be bought in supermarkets now. But they have the advantage that they are a "safe" place for inexperienced parents who don't know the first thing about which buggy to buy, and a "nice" place for grandparents choosing cutesy outfits (that would have been a lot cheaper in Primark).
Much as I love shopping in CEX, I'm not sure about the longer term future for a company relying on second hand DVDs/ games, now so much is streamed. People will still buy the physical products that they love (in HMV etc), but CEX kind of rely on the people who like things and then discard them - and such people are much more suited to Netflix / Play Station Network etc.
The aficionados will keep buying the originals in places like HMV but they won't sell them at CEX for a quarter of what they originally paid - much of the stock in CEX is from five/ten years ago now - so I don't know what they can do to turn that around. Focus on the second hand electronics? Game will suffer too, but at least people will need Game to buy original products - and they have diversified into toys/ clothing/ merchandise.
It's easy to say that there appear to be too many phone shops (there certainly do to me) - they face the additional problem that phones from five years ago are still about good enough - you wouldn't want a five year old phone in 2003 or 2008 but smart phones got to a level that was good enough for most people about five years ago, so there's less *need* for the latest version.
If you are a serious gamer or photographer then an iphone 5 will seem archaic but to Joe Public it does most things that an iphone X does, so there becomes less need to keep upgrading, so less need for mobile phone shops that relied on us changing our phones every twelve/ twenty four months.