My kids (8 + 6) have poured through argos catalogues their whole lives thinking about toys. Rather than using that as a springboard into the app (quick QR code) where you can then click and deliver with your sainsburys order, Argos seems to be in a managed decline, getting rid of everything that differentiates it from competitors.

Argos sales have been stable at around 4bn gbp a year in recent years as far as I can tell, but finally reported substantial growth after lockdown shifted most of their sales online. I'm not convinced holding on to their catalog as long as they did has done them any favours.

The growth seen in the area has gone almost entirely to amazon

The growth I referred to was explicitly Argos, which has seen consistent growth through all of 2020, with Nov/Dec being 8% up year over year.

8% isn't huge, but it contributed to the majority of Sainsbury's overall growth in the period, and it's a massive turnaround for Argos given it's revenues have basically stayed about the same level for a decade.

Online sales as a percentage of all retail sales in the UK have been steadily increasing by about 2pp per year for the last decade until 2019 [0]

In 2020 this increased from 19% to 28%, from £76b to £99b [1]

For Argos sales to only be up 8% in 2020, or £320m, isn't good, it took just 1.3% of the extra online sales. Remember also that Argos (on the whole) remained open for collection during the lockdowns inside of Sainsburys.

[0] https://www.ons.gov.uk/businessindustryandtrade/retailindust...

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/315506/online-retail-sal...

The scanned versions are online: https://ikeamuseum.com/en/our-catalogues/

(the certificate has expired today; I’m trying to find who to alert about that)

Also: https://archive.org/details/ikea-museum-catalogues/IKEA%20Mu...