Column: It's time to welcome a rather underwhelming 'new' name to our high streets

The latest change we will have to deal with is the sale of WH Smith.

The chain has been split into two parts. There will still be WH Smith shops in places like airports. That’s the part of the business that makes money because it sells overpriced bottles of water after you have been through security that made you throw away any fluids over 100ml.

You’re just about to sit on a plane with dehydrating air. It’s a licence to print money, but not using the inkjet ink they sell. No-one could afford that.

The high street version had bigger problems. It is a shop that sells books, but not as many as a book shop, magazines, while no-one is buying those, and stationery in an age of email.

From personal experience, they made most of their money by trying to sell you a half-price chocolate bar. Even if you were buying a book about to 5:2 diet and a copy of Slimming World magazine, they’d still ask you if you wanted a half-price chocolate bar.

The high street arm has been sold to the owner of Hobbycraft for £76million and it sounds like they won’t be making many changes. Who buys a business that’s struggling to make money and keeps it the same?

One big change is the name. Seeing as WH Smith will still be an active brand on the air-side of airport security, they had to find a different name for the shops on the High Street.

They will be renaming the 480 stores as TGJones.

I don’t want to come across as too judgemental but that is the worst name for a shop I have ever heard. It’s like someone was trying to come up with a parody of WH Smith for a BBC TV show where they aren’t allowed to show brands.

TGJones sounds like the butcher’s shop from Dad’s Army. TGJones sounds like an adult parody of that William Shatner police drama.

It’s fitting that the new owners, Modella Capital, are the owners of Hobbycraft because, much like a hobby, it sounds like it won’t make money.

I don’t know why I’m getting upset. I still call Starbursts Opal Fruit and sometimes refer to a Marathon bar, so by the time I stop calling these shops WH Smith they’ll have been replaced by a betting shop decades ago.