British retailers need to fight back with… scones

IT’S HARD TO find a positive headline at the moment – unless, that is, you’re a shareholder of an US technology company. “Combined, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Facebook earned $28 billion,” reported The New York Times on 31 July. “Amazon had warned investors to expect profits to be wiped out by $4 billion in coronavirus-related costs. Although the firm spent as much as promised, sales grew so fast that it turned a $5 billion profit for the second quarter, double the result of the year before.”

Three weeks earlier, by contrast, John Lewis announced that it was closing eight of its 50 department stores, including the Watford branch where I worked for three years during the late 1990s. This was yet another hammer blow to shopping centres that rely on John Lewis, and other big retailers, to lure in shoppers from miles around.

As it has for years, the Amazon juggernaut continues to plough through the UK’s high streets. Combined with the impact of Covid-19, it doesn’t take an epidemiologist to predict the result. Until last Saturday, I hadn’t visited our local town for several weeks, and while I was expecting shuttered windows I was taken aback by the sheer number of closed shops. Closed forever, that is.

Perhaps this shouldn’t have shocked me as much as it did. Since March, our household has relied on online deliveries more than ever, with Amazon earning the lion’s share of non-grocery sales. Aside from one local shop, which pivoted to deliveries when doors were closed, my money has been diverted out of town, out of county and, to a larger extent than I’d like to admit, out of country.

So why are we collectively turning to Amazon and other US firms when we know that the profits head overseas and we’re inflicting harm on much-loved British retailers?

If I had to distil it to one word, it would be convenience. Pushed for a second, I’d go for laziness. And I include myself in this. Amazon makes my life easy because it does what John Lewis used to do: provide a one-stop shop for everything. Its seemingly infinite marketplace stretches from aardvark soft toys to ZZ Top CDs.

While we’ve seen plenty of British companies innovate online, I struggle to think of a success story that comes close to Amazon. Yet don’t imagine for a second that Amazon is so brilliant that it’s impervious to attack. If you turn to this month’s Labs ( see p68), where I pit 35 monitors against one another, you’ll see that I end up castigating Amazon’s awful decision to lump a family of similarsounding monitors together. Let’s not even begin to talk about whether you can trust the star ratings or the reviews.

It’s not too late for British companies to adapt to this new and most challenging of decades. It doesn’t have to be purely online, either. I know from my time at John Lewis that The Place to Eat was always the least profitable of all the departments, often operating at a loss, but it’s also the honey that attracts the shopper bee; even as I type these words, I’m visualising one of its warm cheese scones cut in half with a dollop of butter slowly melting.

Short of popping a microwave, cheese scone and butter in every box, Amazon can’t match this experience. This advantage, a genuine pleasure attached to shopping, is what will keep me coming back to John Lewis for years to come. If British retail is to survive then it needs to come up with more “people magnets” – and fast.