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More M&S woes

Tuesday, 5th August 2008

I wrote last month about one of the problems with M&S. But it's clear that there is a lot more wrong with M&S than its obsession with Ms Klass.

Yesterday I had some spare time and wandered in to the Oxford Street branch as I needed a pair of shoes. Will I never learn?

It's been a good couple of years since I was there, but I remembered that one of the strong points of M&S shoes is that they are nothing fancy - good solid traditional shoes - and that one can try on all sorts of shapes and sizes easily.

No more. First, it seemed as if they didn't have a single pair of 'normal' shoes - the entire range now appears to consist of 'designer' shoes with all sorts of trendy designs and patterns on the leather. I'm sure I'm not alone in going to M&S specifically to avoid such fashions. I don't want to look like a sad 43 year old trying to look 25. I want to look my age, with nornal - boring, perhaps - shoes.

But that's the least of it. Instead of the usual M&S display - lots of different sizes out on display so one can try them for size at one's leisure - they now have just one pair of each shoe on display, and you have to ask the assistant to get the size you want from the stock cupboard.

And there is, of course, just one assistant working. In Oxford Street! There was a stream of people to the shoe department each of whom did what I did - took one look at the set up and left.

The two people who were being served were talking to each other, saying how ridiculous it was. One wanted to try four pairs on in three different sizes, but felt embarrassed to ask the assistant to bring out 12 pairs. The other said he couldn't be bothered any more and was leaving.

What is this obsession - M&S is not alone in this - with looking trendy, at the direct expense of practicality? Yes, the shoe area is now all light and airy. But that's partly because there are no longer any customers.

Slowly but surely, I am coming to hate M&S, as it seems now to stand for everything wrong with modern Britain: superficial, broken and completely bloody useless.

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Alf Tupper

August 5th, 2008 11:38am

Spot on.

I used to buy most of my stuff from Marks' - dependable, no fuss, quality, tatfree, yet affordable gear - but that ended 10 years ago, maybe more.

Through habit, I did continue going there and it took a while to click that I was wasting my time. You are right in that they seem to have this idea that anything Italian in name and of Moroccan manufacture is going to jump off the shelf for those reasons alone.

M&S used to be somewhere you could go to escape, in your late twenties, from the idiot strut of designer labels, to settle yourself into some comfort whilst retaining a modicum of workaday style. They always seemed in those days, to be making good money.

Quite why their executives remain blind, despite successive restructuring, to what used to be their success is pitiful. It's like watching all over again, the travesty which attended the spiralling down of the British auto industry.

Dambuster

August 5th, 2008 12:29pm

Why do so many of today's shops sell clothes and footwear which make people look as though they've just come off a building site? Why are people today content to dress down to the point where most look like slobs? Why are the colours of most clothes like a tribute to some dull early 1970s British film - purples, browns, navy blues? Why would anyone want to wear a scruffy looking tee shirt with a random pre distressed number logo on it? Why do some men insist on wearing tan shoes with black or blue suits?

What happened to style?

I won't wear anything but very plain oxford style shoes. And not those with the squared off toes either. It's getting hard to come by them in places like M&S, who seem to think we all want to wear some curly toed mocassin which makes us look like an extra from Kismet.

Juan Kerr

August 5th, 2008 8:10pm

What's up with Mylene Klass?

I wouldn't climb over her to get to you.

Anglica

August 6th, 2008 10:29pm

It's a Franco-German Theory type thing. Style prevails over substance.
In its practical application: nothing matters for the idiot plebs so long as they imagine they're in fashion - in euro vogue. And we, the culturally invaded? We are unutterably inferior in matters of appearance and taste....We have made NO contribution to any form of art - and that'll soon include science, law, etc. !!!
etc. !!!