The Scottish Mail on Sunday

You’ve done very well, Mr Day...

- by Simon Watkins CITY EDITOR simon.watkins@mailonsund­ay.co.uk

THE days of Grace Bros are long gone but even our more modern department stores may be facing the final curtain, or so most sales statistics suggest. Even amid the recent surge in consumer spending, department stores have continued to struggle. What is more, this is not limited to the UK – sales are falling at big US department store chains.

Online shopping is the main cause, along with a shift in behaviour that has seen us all spend less on clothes and other durable consumer goods and more on leisure and services. Skip the new shoes, have lunch out instead.

All of which is why the launch this weekend of a new department store by Edinburgh Woollen Mills entreprene­ur Philip Day is a fascinatin­g step. Others, like Mike Ashley, are also showing interest in reviving the department store model.

Part of the rationale appears to be that a department store may provide a home for the many orphan brands of the British high street, such as Jaeger and Austin Reed, which have collapsed into administra­tion and have no stores of their own but whose names still have cachet. Day has even found a use for an ex-BHS store to house his venture.

As someone with fond childhood memories of visits to department stores in the days when stores like Grace Bros were a reality, I would love to see something of their grandeur and style survive. I do also feel, however, that for those big high street sites and the kind of brands that Day will use to populate his store, this could be the last roll of the dice. SOMETIMES Royal Bank of Scotland deserves criticism and needs to be brought to heel. At other times it ends up being a scapegoat for conspiracy theorists and the target of pure unfocused anger.

Right now we are seeing examples of both. The call by rival banks to force RBS to sell off billions of pounds worth of business loans is a reasonable solution to its continued dominance of that market. Forcing it to do so will allow smaller rivals to bulk up, gain new relationsh­ips with customers, reduce their own funding costs and help significan­tly in making the banking sector more competitiv­e.

When it comes to the urgent desire in some quarters to see the bank and its former boss Fred Goodwin face the courts, I have less sympathy. Don’t misunderst­and me – it would be great to see Goodwin take the stand. But anyone who believes that forcing such an appearance will shed any new light on the collapse of RBS is mistaken.

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