WH Smith reported another sales dip today. Its like-for-like sales were down 6% year on year for the 14 weeks to 8 June, while total sales in its high-street division fell 8%.

Looking back over the last year or more of our coverage of Smiths, you’ll find a striking similarity in headlines. ‘Profits up, sales down’ tends to be the gist. That’s hardly surprising, as outgoing CEO Kate Swann has focused on relentlessly cutting costs and boosting margins.

It’s been a remarkable story, in many ways: profit before tax hit £102m in 2011-2, up from £76m in 2007-8. Turnover has dropped from £1.35bn to £1.24bn in the same period.

Meanwhile, Smiths’ Travel division has been forging ahead with more stores in airports and railway stations. Travel outlets are now slightly ahead of high-street stores: 643 to 621. But even this strategy isn’t a magic bullet: Smiths said today total sales at its Travel branches were flat for the last quarter.

WH Smith said it remains “confident” about the outcome for the full year, but it’s hard to know what’s next for the nation’s favourite newsagent. Or bookshop. Or stationery seller. Whichever WH Smith is, exactly.

And therein lies the rub, I think. When I walk past a WH Smith, I want it to tell me why I should go in. But I’m not sure what I can buy there that I can’t get somewhere else. The last thing I bought at a WH Smith was a bottle of water at an airport. And the time before that, I’m pretty sure, was also a bottle of water at an airport. Which shows, if nothing else, the Travel division is at least reaching shoppers Smiths wouldn’t normally get.

As for the high-street wing, Smiths is one of those names loaded with nostalgia. I can remember whiling away the hours in the branch in my local shopping mall as a teenager – though precisely what its appeal was now escapes me. Perhaps it was because it stocked Star Trek books. When I walk into Smiths now, it still has that same ‘WH Smith smell’ – a not-unpleasant, carpet-y aroma. And it looks exactly the same. I don’t mean to be unkind when I say it’s something of a time capsule.

Heaven forbid the high-street incarnation of WH Smith should follow the fate of that other great multitasker, Woolworths. But if it were to disappear, I’d have no right to wail and gnash my teeth, because I simply don’t shop there.

Steve Clarke, the current head of the high-street business, who replaces Swann this month, has a job ahead of him. Will he supply us with more of the same headlines? Or will he give me a reason to stick my head back in a Smiths?

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