There can be relatively few householders in the UK who have not bought a television, laptop, hi-fi, fridge or washing machine from one of the companies overseen by Stanley Kalms, Lord Kalms, who has died aged 93. Working up from a single north London camera shop to a chain of 1,300 branches of Curry’s, Dixons, PC World and The Link by the time he retired in 2002, Kalms bestrode the high streets and shopping malls of Britain with a portfolio that made him the largest electronics retailer in Europe with a fortune of £300m.
The white goods equipment, cameras and computers that Kalms sold interested him less than the act of selling: he could not use a computer and had difficulty operating a mobile phone. What mattered was the bottom line. “I get a buzz seeing people walking round my store and buying my products, walking up to a cash till and paying for them,” he told the Sunday Times in 2001. His stores, he would say, were really toy shops for men.
