July 4, 2008
British consumers face their retail reckoning
I have written a Saturday column for the FT about the UK economic downturn. I happen to be in London at the moment to witness it. You can read the column here and comment below.
Incidentally, I start the piece with an anecdote from Margaret Drabble’s The Ice Age, a novel I have always liked, which takes place in the aftermath of the 1974 property crash. In this context, I have a story to relate.
A few weeks ago, I was thinking to myself that I would like to get hold of a copy of The Ice Age because the 1970s crash seems to hold lessons for today. I was in New York and I was wondering how I could do so.
Later that morning, I was walking up Crosby Street in SoHo when I passed a second hand bookshop and looked to my left. There, in the midst of the front window display, bizarrely, sat a hardback copy of The Ice Age.
I went into the store and bought it for $10. There is serendipity for you.
M & S has never made an impact in continental Europe. In comparison with H&M & Zara, the only part of Europe that M&S has a meaningful presence is in the Balkans, and for that it has a Greek partner, the supermarket chain Marinopoulos. In fact there’s not a bad small M&S in Kifissia (an upmarket Athens suburb) in a nice “open air” village-style shopping mall, and I’ve bought stuff there.
Marinopoulos opened an M&S store in Geneva (a couple of years ago?). I went into it once and frankly it looked to me as if it was stocked with the stuff that perhaps the Greeks in Kifissia and/or the customers in the Balkans didn’t buy.
As far as M&S in London is concerned, I wouldn’t buy their pre-packed “food” (industrial foods produced on factory assembly lines and too much added flavouring and colouring for me).
Posted by: J.J. | July 6th, 2008 at 1:02 pm | Report this commentJG - just a few more words, before Fedex and Nadal come on court, about the British retail sector. The British economy policy seems to be to hang on to the USA’s coat-tails. A recession develops slowly, but when the jobless rate goes up, it’s very hard to create “real” jobs again, unless they are in the public sector like the hundreds of thousands of counsellors, assistants, coordinators etc that Brown created to mask the unemployment after mass privatisations in the public sector in the UK.
Why did M&S not benefit from the creation of the
EU/the Eurozone, as did Zara, H&M, Metro, Carrefour, to name a few? No doubt the UK not being in the Eurozone was a contributory factor?
Germany is a retail desert, imo, ideal for M&S if they had been willing to invest money AND time and hire the right people. Thomas Middlehoff, for example, and his restructuring in the German retail sector (aka Arcandor) and expected to pay a dividend on this year’s results. Why doesn’t M&S take over Arcandor before it gets too pricey? Hasn’t Middlehoff left to join some PE outfit?
Posted by: J.J. | July 6th, 2008 at 1:49 pm | Report this comment