In volatile times, John Lewis unquestionably remains a High Street success story, a retailer with an apparently unshakeable grip on its share of the marketplace.
Last week the group announced annual pre-tax profits of more than £329 million, which ensured eight weeks’ extra wages for its 91,000 staff, who received a 15 per cent bonus.
It was no one-off. Last year, the workers – or partners as the powers that be at John Lewis prefer to call them – received a 17 per cent bonus, while other retailers, from HMV to Blockbuster and Jessops, had called in the administrators.
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The template for continuing success at John Lewis would appear to embrace a strong workplace culture which fosters a team effort approach, to a ‘bricks and clicks’ mix which recognises the importance of online trading alongside the more traditional consumer footfall.
Talking to Solihull head of branch Julie Blake on Bonus Day last week, it was clear that this upmarket workers’ co-operative – if they’ll forgive the expression – takes understandable pride in their achievements.
And why not? The group will soon open a £100 million store in Birmingham, city centre, anchoring the New Street redevelopment. Just five years after the worst recession in living memory, which decimated large parts of the High Street, that’s some going.
Scratch the surface of John Lewis a little more, and some interesting facts emerge. Julie Blake reports a 13-year sales high at Solihull, two per cent up on last year.
She adds: “Some of our customers are going online to buy at 7am. The technology market is frightening and it is going to continue to grow.
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“People sit on their sofas with their iPads and they are shopping. Everybody wants a tablet and some people want two. There is all that shift in technology and there is always going to be new innovation
“Shopping is 24 hours, seven days a week now. The days of early closing on Wednesdays are long gone.”
Well, you can certainly say that. Half-day closing, when High Street tailors, butchers, fishmongers and the like would shut up shop to go and find a country pub which didn’t close at 2.30pm – there were one or two if you knew the right people – is as much a relic of 海角视频 history as Filofaxes, Austin Maestros or 80s-style shoulder pads.
But the John Lewis story is not merely a tale of retail success in a harsh environment. It also casts an illuminating light on society and the way we live now. If the store group is a barometer of spending habits, it’s intriguing to consider the apparent priorities of those consumers.
As Julie Blake at Solihull says, we seem to be increasingly reliant on tablets, and I’m not talking headache pills or anti-depressants here. High-tech sales at the Solihull store grew by 15 per cent last year, compared to five per cent for fashion and two per cent for home furnishings and the like. The geeks are winning hands-down. Or, to put it a little less brutally, consumers in affluent Solihull would seem to be rather more interested in buying an iPad or an iPhone than splashing out on a new suit or a three-piece suite.
What does this tell us? I’m reminded of the words of Jim Wood-Smith, former head of research at investment management company Williams de Broe back in 2011, when he considered the future growth of electric cars.
“Marketing and strategy executives at auto-makers report that young people today say the one device they cannot live without is not a car but a phone and that owning a car outright appears low on their list of priorities.”
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In other words, the younger generation would swap the enviable freedom of being able to go where they like when they like for the dubious privilege of being attached 24-7 to a piece of digital software.
Last year, prominent banker Derek Sach, head of Global Restructuring at RBS, told the Post: “There is a fundamental restructure going on in the retail world. There is a fundamental shift to doing things on the Internet.
“It is quite rare to find a person in their 20s who can write a decent page of English. We have very bright people who exist on bullet points – if you ask them to write a cogent piece of English, they can’t do it. And 17 to 18 year-olds are not learning to drive as we did; they spend their whole lives in a virtual world.”
Let’s make one or two points clear here. Technology has changed the world, immeasurably for the better. The Internet has transformed global communications, and is as crucial a development for mankind as the wheel, the printing press and the internal combustion engine.
The net may have sent large swathes of society into a tailspin, including the high street, the traditional media, old style travel agents and the pornographic magazine industry, but the many and varied benefits to society have been immense.
It has also given us the tweeting delights of Lord Prescott, Piers Morgan, Lord Sugar, Kevin Pietersen, Sally Bercow and a few other digital egos with little else to do but attempt to bore the rest of humanity into a sort of weary submission. But we’ll draw a (virtual) veil over such matters.
In any case, you can hardly blame technology for deluded show-offs endlessly wallowing in their own absurd self-importance.
But if addicted users are unable to shake off their iPads and mobiles for a few hours to learn how to drive – or read a book, or go for a walk, or play with their children – something has gone drastically wrong somewhere.