Argos is a catalogue retailer, and its shopping method is so specific to Britain that explaining it abroad produces bafflement. You do not walk around a shop looking at products. You look them up in a book.
How it works
- Enter a small showroom containing almost no merchandise, but a great many laminated catalogues on stands.
- Find your item in the catalogue and note its item number.
- Write it on a small paper slip using a tiny blue pen, which is chained to the counter and never has much ink left.
- Check stock on a terminal, pay at a till, and receive a ticket number.
- Wait in a seated area watching a board, while unseen staff retrieve your item from a stockroom.
- Your number appears, and a box emerges through a hatch.
The process has been substantially digitised — you can now order on a phone and collect — but the fundamental shape is unchanged, and the pen has entered the national consciousness in its own right.
The catalogue
For decades the Argos catalogue was one of the most printed publications in Europe, running to over a thousand pages and issued twice a year. It was, in a great many British households, the closest thing to a department store that came through the letterbox.
Its cultural function was largely about Christmas. British children spent November going through the toy section and circling things, sometimes with a pen, sometimes with a code of their own devising, and handing it to their parents. This was a genuine ritual for at least two generations.
The print catalogue was discontinued in 2020, and the announcement produced a national wave of nostalgia entirely disproportionate to a shop catalogue.
Why the model exists
It is a serious retail strategy rather than an eccentricity. Holding stock in a warehouse behind a small showroom means:
- Far less expensive floor space than a conventional shop of the same range.
- An enormous product range — jewellery, toys, furniture, electricals, garden equipment — in a unit the size of a small supermarket.
- Almost no shoplifting, because nothing is on display.
The founder, Richard Tompkins, had previously run Green Shield Stamps, the loyalty scheme where shoppers collected stamps and redeemed them from a catalogue at collection centres. Argos was built directly on that infrastructure in 1972 when he converted the redemption centres into shops.
Where it is now
Argos was bought by Sainsbury’s in 2016, and the strategy since has been to close standalone stores and move concessions inside supermarkets — which suits a business built on collection rather than browsing.
It sits at a very particular point in British retail: unglamorous, reliable, and where a large number of households buy a washing machine, a bike, a mattress or a child’s birthday present without ceremony. The affection for it is genuine and slightly ironic, which is a combination Britain specialises in.