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Hello and welcome to the programme.

From the olden days of Woolworths and Quick Save, which ultimately failed,

to the Aldis and Liddles that populate our high streets today,

there has always been an appeal to the retail model of cheap and cheerful, or pile them high.

But never have discounters

seem to exert so much pressure on mainstream retailers as now. Can any consumers shopping around,

or maybe broke consumers? Something has happened. Maybe the discount retailers have refined

their models to better compete. Well, today we want to look at why the apparently flourishing end of the high street

is the cheap one.

I've got three guests who know this field extremely well, so let us meet them.

And first up is Barry Williams, managing director of Poundland.

Now, Barry, for the few people who've never been into a Poundland, just describe now what the

story is.

Well, pound land's a variety, fixed-price discount retailer.

So what that means is we're a discounter and we sell the vast majority of our products for, would you believe, a pound?

We operate in over 800 shops up and down the length of the UK, Republic of Ireland.

We have small but exciting businesses in Spain and in Poland, 18,000 colleagues work in the business and we serve

7 million happy customers a week. It's a properly sized business. You said almost everything is

at a pound, exactly how much is it a pound and what else have you got that isn't at a pound?

Yes, we operate currently three price points so 85% of our range is offered at a pound and then we

offer some selected different products at two pound and five pound but it's all round number prices

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