A trip to Croydon’s Purley Way does much to put Allied Carpets’ recent difficulties in perspective. This is a location where Allied Carpets and rival Carpetright are side by side, providing a straightforward compare and contrast exercise.

These are torrid times for Allied Carpets. Allied Carpets Properties, a subsidiary of the carpets retailer, has filed notice of intention to appoint an administrator. Whether this presages a more general company-wide collapse remains unclear, but the signs are hardly auspicious.

To get a sense of why things have come to this pass, a trip to Croydon’s Purley Way does much to put things in perspective. This is a location where Allied Carpets and rival Carpetright are side by side, providing a straightforward compare and contrast exercise. And perhaps it might be easiest to describe the similarities before moving on to the differences.

Stand outside these two stores, stare at the windows and it’s quite hard to tell them apart, if you are to judge by the promotions plastered across the glass. For Carpetright, the message seems to be a half-price sale “then An Extra 20% off 100s of carpets.”

Next door, Allied has an “Up to 50% off” sale accompanied by the claim “we’ll beat any quote.” This may be so, but there seems little to choose between the two offers if the point of sale and window promotional blitzkrieg is anything to go by.

There must therefore be a further reason why Allied has fared so badly. Carpets, or floor-coverings as those in the sector refer to this form of retail, are a difficult commodity at the moment. The rule of thumb would seem to be that homewares is a tough market and the bigger the ticket price, the more problematical things become. But even given this backdrop, there is a substantial variation between these two retailers and it is found in-store.

These are stores that purport to sell carpets and yet Allied has opted for what looks to be the lowest-cost floor-covering it could get to kit out this branch. It’s a sort of non-descript grey turquoise and owing to the fact that there is a mezzanine in this store, the ceiling is high, meaning that a high(ish) level of lighting should be in order. This is absent and the outcome is a rather gloomy store interior where the stock is not shown to advantage.

The contrast with Carpetright could hardly be sharper. In-store lighting levels here are very much higher and as well as brighter carpeting on the floor, different colours have been used to demarcate the different zones within the shop. This is altogether a more uplifting experience and given the choice, shoppers would probably opt for Carpetright, rather than its neighbour.

Generally, the reason why some things work and others don’t is a fusion of several different causes. When there are broadly similar offers, price alone will not prove enough to convince.