Trouble at John Lewis
Have the middle class lost their love for the giant of department stores?
As Britain’s favourite department store warns of falling profits, Lindsay Nicholson asks where it’s all going wrong
Inipped into my local Waitrose yesterday. Not a full-scale shopping trip – just a top-up of those middle-class essentials: Greek yogurt, almond milk, blueberries and moth repellent. It’s one of the flagship stores, blissfully cool in the heatwave, and so clean you could perform heart surgery in the delicatessen aisle… And when I got to the checkout I nearly needed a bypass operation – £80, eighty flipping quid, and I hadn’t even bought prosecco!
When I recovered my composure, I made a mental note to go to Aldi more often – even if, every time I do, there seems to be some sort of altercation in the car park. And they don’t do any packing for you, just fling your purchases down the end of the till and glare at you as you scramble to collect them before they get muddled with someone else’s. But I have never, ever spent £80 there – not even when I go to stock up on cleaning products, especially dishwasher tablets (which require a second mortgage if you buy them at Waitrose).
So, after my Waitrose wobble, I wasn’t too surprised when I saw the news that the John Lewis Partnership, which owns the John Lewis department stores and Waitrose supermarkets, has issued a profits warning and announced shop closures. While the arrival of a new Waitrose store used to be a sign that an area was moving upmarket – residents of Sidcup, Kent, campaigned for a Waitrose in their high street a few years back – the attention has shifted to the cut-price supermarkets. Saving money is in vogue, and in the heartlands of Britain, it is now classier to serve Lidl lobster than Waitrose poster-boy Heston Blumenthal’s tea-smoked salmon.
And what of John Lewis itself, that model of benign consumerism, where in line with its founding principles, profits are distributed among the permanent workforce of 85,000 “partners”. While the Oxford Street store is still a glittering showcase of upscale brands, with a rooftop bar for cocktails, it can be a very different story elsewhere. I will drive 20 miles to the Brent Cross John Lewis rather than travel less than half that distance to the Watford branch – where even the call of 800-thread bed linen reduced for clearance wouldn’t induce me to shop there.
And the famed customer service isn’t all it’s cracked up to be either. Recently, I bought a Bose sound system online, because I’ve always believed that John Lewis has the best advice and after-sales. I had it delivered via Click and Collect to my local Waitrose (of the gleaming floors) from which it was a cinch to transfer the heavy box from trolley to car. Then the sound system developed an irritating flaw in that it occasionally refused to play any music.
I emailed John Lewis online. Take it to a store and have it seen to, they said. It’s too heavy for me to carry, I said. Can’t I take it to the Waitrose where I picked it up and use a trolley? No can do, they said. So now it sits glowering at me, sometimes deciding to play, and sometimes not, as I have since given up on my appeals to John Lewis customer service, which I used to rate only slightly below divine justice.
Even so, I have sympathy for John Lewis. I really do. For a start they are hoist by the petard of one of the most successful marketing slogans ever devised – Never Knowingly Undersold. This was first introduced in 1925 and, for 85 years, customers who found the same goods cheaper elsewhere could claim a refund of the difference. This was necessarily amended in 2010 – after the impact of digital – to refer only to bricks and mortar competitors. But last year Money Saving Expert found instances of products where this was not the case.
A headache for Paula Nickolds, the then newly appointed MD – a John Lewis lifer who started as a graduate trainee in 1994, and has now been left to grapple with the demands of a customer base which expects higher quality and service at lower prices than ever before without customer loyalty in return.
Today, we use stores just to prod, poke and play with products, before returning home and ordering them cheaper online. John Lewis has become the retail equivalent of a soft-play area for adults, only to see the profits go to rivals with far lower overheads.
John Lewis has responded by acknowledging that the retail sector is going through a period of “generational change”. Its response will be to focus on “greater differentiation” and invest more in developing “unique” products and services, as well as placing more emphasis on its own brand.
I hope they succeed, because we will all be the poorer when all that’s left on the high street are the estate agents, charity shops and coffee chains.
When I was editor of Good Housekeeping, that bible of middle England, our readers’ affection for John Lewis and Waitrose was self-evident. Purchases there marked the great rituals of life, and readers talked of how they felt soothed once inside its doors.
Audrey Hepburn famously went to Tiffany’s with her takeout breakfast because “nothing bad could ever happen there”. We ordinary mortals in Britain have felt the same way about John Lewis; it has been our happy place. If something bad does happen there, whose fault will it be?