Toast - Phones 4u

Sliced Bread

BBC

Health & Fitness

4.6 • 634 Ratings

🗓️ 5 December 2024

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The mobile phone retailer, Phones 4u, was hugely profitable, so why did it have to close all of its 700+ shops?

The BBC Business journalist, Sean Farrington and the entrepreneur, Sam White discover how Phones 4u ended up toast with help from expert guests including:

John Caudwell - Phones 4u founder

Nikki Barrow & Chris Papageorgiou - former Phones 4u staff members

Ian White - editor of Mobile News magazine

Produced by Jon Douglas. Toast is a BBC Audio North production for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds.

You can email the programme at [email protected]

Feel free to suggest topics which could be covered in future episodes.

Sliced Bread returns for a new batch of investigations in December, where Greg Foot investigates so-called wonder products to find out whether they really are the best thing since sliced bread. In the meantime, Toast is available in the Sliced Bread feed on BBC Sounds

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, podcast fan.
0:03.0	Consider this your invite to the UK's biggest podcasting party.
0:06.7	We're heading to Sheffield from the 4th to the 6th of July
0:09.0	for the BBC Sounds Fringe at the Crossed Wires Festival.
0:12.8	We'll be joined by some of the biggest names in podcasting,
0:15.3	including Sarah Cox, Charlie Hedges, Russell Kane,
0:18.4	and some bloke called Greg James doing his Radio 4 show called Rewinder.
0:22.6	You can watch live shows of your favourite podcasts, and the best part is free.
0:27.6	To book your free tickets, go to crossedwires. Live, forward slash fringe.
0:34.6	BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts.
0:40.0	Hello and welcome to Toast, the BBC Radio 4 series that has a look at these incredible brands, incredible businesses that were once hugely successful, but still somehow ended up Toast.
0:52.8	I'm the BBC business journalist, Sean Farrington, with me, of course, our resident business experts, entrepreneur, Sam White.
1:00.5	Hey, Sam, how are you doing?
1:01.6	Hey, Trouble. How are you?
1:03.2	I'm good, I'm good.
1:04.6	Sam is not in the know about what's coming up.
1:07.8	Regular listeners will know that.
1:09.0	We'd like to keep her in the dark so that we get those genuine off-the-cuff reactions and analysis. Sam, you're going to find this one particularly
1:16.7	interesting. We have the entrepreneur at the heart of it all joining us. No way. That's exciting.
1:23.9	Let's crack on and we can reveal all.
1:31.4	So today, many of us couldn't live without our mobile phones.
1:35.1	It's funny to think that when they first came out, people couldn't see the point of having one.
	...

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