shut up shop

English

Pronunciation

• Audio (General Australian):

  (file)

Verb

shut up shop (third-person singular simple present shuts up shop, present participle shutting up shop, simple past and past participle shut up shop)

1. (intransitive, British, colloquial) To close up shop; to end a business activity.

   The company decided to shut up shop in this country and move to America, where corporate taxes are lower.

   • c. 1921 (date written), Karel Čapek, translated by Paul Selver, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots): A Fantastic Melodrama […], Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, published 1923, →OCLC, Act 1:

     Well, he then decided to manufacture everything as in the human body. I'll show you in the museum the bungling attempt it took him ten years to produce. It was to have been a man, but it lived for three days only. Then up came young Rossum, an engineer. He was a wonderful fellow, Miss Glory. When he saw what a mess of it the old man was making, he said: "It's absurd to spend ten years making a man. If you can't make him quicker than nature, you might as well shut up shop."

   • 2019 April 29, Philip Oltermann, “Are the hyper-specialist shops of Berlin the future of retail?”, in The Guardian‎^[1], retrieved 2021-07-26:

     Instead of shutting up shop, Ghouneim relocated to humdrum Wittenau, a suburb of Berlin, and got some tape artists to decorate the facade of the new building.

   • 2020 July 1, Daniel Puddicombe, “How can heritage lines recover from enforced closures?”, in Rail, page 30:

     But like almost every other business sector, the Coronavirus outbreak in March has forced every single heritage railway to shut up shop for several months... at a time when they would normally be at their busiest.

   • 2023, Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood, page 128:

     After months of bitter disagreements and legal back-and-forth, he had finally given up and struck out on his own, but he'd met with a string of bad luck—a client who refused to pay, a flood, a false insurance claim—and he'd had to shut up shop; now he was working for a big construction firm as a gun for hire and telling anybody who would listen what a rotten hand he had been dealt.

2. (intransitive, cricket) To bat defensively in the last innings of a match in order to force a draw when winning is not possible.

References

• “shut up shop”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.