Marks can survive – as a local hero

IT IS no surprise that M&S is shedding 7,000 jobs. This was sadly likely to happen even without the pandemic, which is crazy. The company is still the largest clothing retailer in town, and although it may no longer be the place where the nation buys its knickers, even those who haven’t been near the place in years care about its fortunes.

I bought two pairs of leggings from them yesterday. Clicked and collected at my local M&S food store, where I also bought some roasted almonds, bananas, dark chocolate and a Grazia magazine. Nothing to complain about there. The store is attractive, the staff helpful and the food pretty good. And it’s around the corner from home. Food is not M&S’s problem, though. It’s the clothes and, despite endless articles like this suggesting that there are too many different brands under the M&S banner selling too many similar styles, it doesn’t get the message.

The policy seems to veer between positioning a few of ‘this season’s must-have’ pieces among the fashion press for publicity, and flooding the website and depressing stores with a baffling array of unnecessary choice.

I don’t subscribe to the view that some of this failure in clothing is due to the fact that the CEOs have all been male, but there does seem to be a disconnect between how M&S thinks about clothes shopping and the reality – remember that almost all clothes for the family are bought by women.

In any imaginable future, it’s unlikely that profitability lies in acres of floor space filled with endless rails of clothes. Which makes M&S’s new plan to expand into out-of-town retail parks properly insane. Some of the success of M&S food is down to the fact that it provides what people want in places they already are. Why don’t they apply that to clothes, now that unfortunately so many smaller businesses are vacating their stores?

Try out some pop-ups, fill them with the things that we all need – the classic white T-shirt (but please no stretch), black tights, a navy cashmere, school uniforms, pyjamas and, yes, some simple basic underwear. Even banking facilities.

We can drop in, grab what we want and then maybe add something else to the basics on a whim. Just as I did with that chocolate.