Woolies didn’t need the big central infrastructure and West End head office, nor did it need shops in expensive prime locations or grand multichannel plans. Its future lay in being the biggest store in the smallest towns.

There was something unreal about the Wednesday last November when Woolworths went into administration.

For all the company’s difficulties and the extraordinary financial turmoil of the time, it was hard to believe that an 800-store business that had been on the high street for 99 years could disappear in a matter of weeks.

Of course it did, and life goes on. The failure of any high street reincarnation of scale to appear shows that, highly unfortunate as the collapse was for everyone who worked for Woolies, the brand had become one that UK consumers could live without.

It didn’t have to be like that. The success of its heirs, like Wilkinson, Poundland and 99p Stores, shows that there is a market for a straightforward, value-focused general merchandise offer on the UK’s secondary high streets.

But management, from chairman Richard North and his predecessors down, didn’t recognise the need to make the bold steps needed to give the chain a long-term future. Woolies didn’t need the big central infrastructure and West End head office, nor did it need shops in expensive prime locations or grand multichannel plans. Its future lay in being the biggest store in the smallest towns.

That’s not to say that something couldn’t and shouldn’t have been rescued from the wreckage.

The haste with which first the credit insurers, then the banks, and then particularly the administrator acted meant that once trouble appeared on the horizon, there was no chance of a restructuring, or a rescue of the profitable core of the chain.

The opportunity the CVA process has given companies like Blacks to restructure has been one of the few good things to come out of this recession. Woolies needed to change, but many of the key players will know they could have done more to save something of the business.