WHSmith: Books, magazines & much more! (WHSmith)

Member Name: katykicker

Product:	WHSmith
Date:	11/05/09 (43 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Well laid out store, helpful & friendly staff, lots of choice.

Disadvantages: Some of the books are quite expensive.

Some aspects of my review may be based on my shopping experiences in my local store in Harlow, Essex.

WH Smith in Harlow is located in the High Street and this is a prime location because they seem to pick up fantastic trade here.

WHSmith specialise in selling books, magazines & stationery and they really do have a vast choice of products on offer.

The magazines in WHSmith take up a good one & a half aisles and there really is pretty much every magazine that you can ever think of. I often see lots of people just standing around here flicking through magazines and the staff never seem to complain or tell them to move on so perhaps they make enough sales not to worry about the odd freebie reader.

There are shelves and shelves of books in Smiths' and they really do seem to stock something for everybody. There are frequently special offers on books and quite often these will be advertised on the TV or on gigantic banners at the front of the store and some of them are really just too good to pass by (for me anyway!). The books are in very good condition and the pricing is nice and clear.

Smiths' have a wide range of stationery and as a young girl I used to adore just browsing around here and buying things solely because they were cute and/or my friends at school would be jealous and ask where I got them from. I do still stop off here but mainly for practical items such as folders or ballpoint pens. They also stock a fairly wide range of Parker Pen cartridges so I used to go here quite frequently for them.

The store is very well laid out with quite wide aisles so there should be no mobility issues with visiting this store, they also have some automatic doors at the front of the store so people with pushchairs or wheelchairs should be able to get in and out fairly easily.

There is a few tills at the front of the store and I believe there are some at the back of the store and there queues here can get quite long which really is my only complaint about the store.

One plus point about visiting Smiths' for me is that they have a cigarette counter and it's the only store within a 5 minute walk that does so I often just pop in here for these and they are fairly reasonably priced (when compared to the other local stores).

I would definitely recommend visiting WHSmith as they don't seem to mind you having a good browse and there are lots of helpful & friendly staff flitting around who are ready to help you find whatever you are looking for and there really is nobody pushing you to hurry up and make your purchase (unless it's closing time of course!). I am rating the store 4/5 and have knocked off one star because of the sometimes ridiculously long queues.

Summary: A great store with lots of choice, especially good for browsing.