Sainsbury’s, Caution and Quality in Business: A Sure but Steady Passage from Solitary Dairy Grocer’s Shop to a Major Supermarket Chain

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Commerce & Business, Local history, Retailing history

Next year, Sainsbury’s, which has long maintained a place on the podium of Britain’s leading supermarkets will reach its sesquicentennial milestone – 150 years in the grocery retailing trade. Over the last 20-plus years the company has had to content itself with the runner-up position in the market leadership ladder of supermarket chains, trailing the seemingly ubiquitous and dynamic Tesco which has swept all before it. Nevertheless, Sainsbury’s has carved itself a distinctive and impressive notch among the titans of modern British retailing since it first opened for business in the Victorian era.

Foundation years, butter and establishing the Sainsbury style
In 1869 the newly wed John James Sainsbury, founded Sainsbury’s in partnership with his wife, Mary Ann Sainsbury (née Staples). The two opened their first dairy goods shop at 173 Drury Lane, Holborn (London). Mrs Sainsbury played an active role in the business, in the early years she effectively managed the Drury Lane shop, making it “famous for the quality of its butter”. As Sainsbury’s built its formative business reputation largely on product quality, Mary Ann (the daughter of a dairyman) insisted on fresh milk on the shop’s shelves, as well as, that the Dutch supplier of Sainbury’s butter date-stamp every unit item it supplied [‘The History of Sainsbury’s – Trying Something New for 147 Years’, (Darren Turner, 11 Nov.), www.s4rb.com]. The freshness and purity of Sainsbury’s butter gave it a commercial edge over the competition in an era known for widespread food adulteration (eg, it was a common practice for milk to be watered down) [Judi Bevan, ‘Battle of the Supermarkets’, RSA Journal, Vol. 152, No 5517 (June 2003)].

In the 19th century Sainsbury’s rivals in the grocery game were shops like Lipton’s and Home and Colonial Stores. Early on John J Sainsbury developed a business model which made the shops stand out from the other grocers by doing things differently. Appearance was important to Sainsbury, the shops were clean and hygienic, on offer were “high-quality products and fresh provisions at prices even London’s poor could afford” (an early shop slogan was “Quality perfect, prices lower”).

A gradualist approach to growth
John J Sainsbury, whose motto could well have been “Make haste slowly”✱, was in no hurry to expand the business. From the Drury Lane foundations he gradually added a shop in Kentish Town and then two more in the new railway suburb⊡. It wasn’t until 1882 that Sainbury made his first move outside London, establishing a shop in Croydon, one that specifically sought to cater for a middle-class clientele, selling comestibles which were in the luxury range (foreign cheeses, poultry and game birds, cooked meat delicacies, etc) [‘Sainsbury family’, (Bridget Salmon), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (23-IX-2004), www.odnb.com].

Even well into the 20th century century each new Sainsbury’s store was a matter of measured deliberation…the company continued “to place the highest priority on quality, taking the time to weigh each decision, whether it meant researching suppliers for a new product, assessing the reliability of a new supplier, or measuring the business potential of a new site” [‘J Sainsbury plc History’, Funding Universe, www.fundinguniverse.com].

During John J Sainsbury’s tenure in charge, the company established what was to become the Sainsbury’s “house style”, stores which were elaborately decorated in contrast with the other (typically drab) grocers of the day. The key to the company’s success was covering all of the bases…John James would price-match the competition while at the same time offering higher standards of quality, service and hygiene. Moreover, the likes of Home and Colonial and Lipton’s, while having numerically more shops, could not match Sainsbury’s range of products [ibid.].

Sainsbury’s “Own Brands”
Although “own brands” are thought of as a modern phenomena in retail merchandising, Sainsbury’s first introduced the concept as early as 1882! The shop’s first own brand was its staple commodity – butter. Sainsbury’s continued this practice and by the 1950s there was a host of such offerings on the shelves: ‘Sainsbury’s Cornflakes’, ‘Sainsbury’s Snax Biscuits’, ‘Sainsbury’s Cola’, ‘Sainsbury’s Peas and Carrots’, etc, etc. [‘The History of Sainsbury’s’, loc.cit.]. By 1980 half of the products Sainsbury’s sold were under its own label [Bevan, op.cit.].

Modernising Sainsbury’s
In 1950 Sainsbury’s refitted one of its earliest shops, in West Croydon, creating what was Britain’s first supermarket proper, one of the country’s earliest to operate as fully self-service. Some customers were at first put off by the innovation, thinking it impersonal and “anti-social”, however the convenience factor of not having to wait to be served eventually won out…Advertising and Marketing magazine reviewing the new store concluded: “From the point of view of the customer the chief advantages of self-service shopping are the speed with which shopping can be done and the ease with which one is reminded of things needed…these advantages substantially outweigh the disadvantages of not getting the personal attention of the assistant.” [‘Sainsbury ‘s return to site of first self-service supermarket’, (Graham Ruddick), The Telegraph (UK), 30-Aug-2013, www.telegraph.co.uk].

Although under its founder Sainsbury’s had been reluctant to get too big too quickly, once the company passed to his successor, son John Benjamin Sainsbury✫, the number of stores grew (though still at a trademark cautious pace). Under the strong leadership of a string of postwar CEOs (such as (John) Baron Sainsbury of Preston Candover), this trend was maintained❂.

Although Sainsbury’s followed a typically cautious approach to its business model, the company couldn’t be accused of dragging its feet when it came to embracing new technology. In the early Sixties they were the first retailer in Britain to develop a computerised distribution system and their stores were among the first to turf out electronic cash registers in favour of scanners in the late Eighties [‘J Sainsbury plc’, www.company-histories.com].

In 1973 the company went public under the holding co name J Sainsbury plc after being floated on the stock market. The 1970s witnessed increasing competition from discounters and a squeezing of profit margins, prompting an escalation in diversification…non-food items started to appear on Sainsbury’s shelves. It also innovated with the advent of ‘Savacentre’ hypermarkets and ‘Homebase’ house and garden centres. Overseas expansion was concentrated in the US – Sainsbury’s acquired Shaw’s Supermarkets, Giant Food Inc and Star Markets (its holdings in Shaw’s were unloaded in 2004).

Stumble and renewal
During the Nineties, Sainsbury’s, hitherto accustomed to being the premier supermarket chain, was relegated to second place by Tesco which became supermarket “top dog” in the UK in 1995. A change-up was required at Sainsbury’s and further diversification was sought. In 1997 the company ventured into in-store banking (in partnership with the Bank of Scotland – before going it alone in 2014). During this period the 130-year direct involvement in running the company of the Sainsbury family came to an end with the retirement of David (Lord) Sainsbury. The acquisition of Bells Stores in the early 2000s signalled a move into convenience stores, adding to the variety of its retail outlets.

Sainsbury’s – status quo in 2018 and future fortunes?
In the contemporary British retail landscape, Sainsbury’s, with a healthy slab of the market, is the second largest chain in the country✥ with ≻1415 stores (2017) and ≻186,900 employees (2018). Despite having long conceded first place to Tesco, this state of play is a fluid one…no longer dominated by the Sainsbury family (though it retains 15% of shares in the company), these days the majority shareholder is the Qatar Investment Authority (note comparisons with Harrods). 2018 has seen Sainsbury’s unearth a bold attempt to unseat Tesco’s hegemony through a planned merger with ASDA which would give the merged entity around 30-31% of the UK market – as against about 27.5% for Tesco (Source: Kantar). Approval of the controversial merger is still pending but could depend upon Sainsbury’s and ASDA offloading 463 of their stores to win over the competition ‘watchdog’ (CMA) [‘Walmart’s Asda agrees to UK merger deal with Sainsbury’s’, (Silvia Amaro) 30-Apr-2018, www.cnbc.com; ‘Sainsbury’s and Asda may have to offload 460 stores to seal merger’, (Sarah Butler), The Guardian, 28-Sep-2018, www.theguardian.com].

Footnote: A “leg-up” for UK supermarkets
As the age of postwar austerity and scarcity gave way to an era of abundance and growth in the 1960s, supermarket heavyweights like Sainsbury’s and Tesco led the way. The supermarket chains on their expansionary arcs was facilitated by legislative changes affecting the retail sector. The abolition of resale price maintenance (RPM)✧ by the British Board of Trade in 1964 was a total game-changer! RPM had allowed (especially large) manufacturers to dictate terms to retailers, the law change shifted the balance in favour of Tesco, Sainsbury’s and co, who now could lord it over even the largest of manufacturers like Unilever and Procter & Gamble [James Buchan, Review of Trolley Wars by Judi Bevan, The Guardian, 30-Apr-2005].

PostScript: How Tesco outmanoeuvred and outgunned Sainsbury’s
One of the key moves made by Tesco was to take careful note of what the older retailer was doing right (eg, offering quality in goods and service) and copying it! (in “Tesco-speak” this is called ‘benchmarking’ the opposition) [Bevan, op.cit.]. As Tesco grew incrementally it benefitted from a “virtuous circle” of business⊙. The sheer, monolithic size of Tesco allows it to buy merchandise more cheaply and accordingly sell it more cheaply. Ergo, they turn over more customers and make greater sales, and so the cycle is sustains itself [Buchan loc.cit.]. Tesco has a reputation for following intuitive hunches…being less risk adverse than other major supermarkets like Sainsbury’s it happily ventured into lower class, ‘brownfield’ areas that its competitors wouldn’t touch [Bevan, op.cit.].

—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧
✱ Festina lente – the motto of Roman emperors Augustus and Titus, et al
⊡ a calculated, gradual approach to expansion suited John James who had a very hands-on management style, by temperament he was a “micro-manager”, immersing himself in the minutiae of the shops’ everyday transactions
✫ known for his focus on staff welfare and remembered by one of his senior staff as a “benevolent dictator”, [‘Sainsbury family’, loc.cit.]
❂ there have so many Sainsbury family members involved in the company, in British politics, in art patronage and philanthropy, to almost necessitate a scorecard
✥ although it briefly conceded second place to the Walmart owned ASDA in 2003/2004
✧ Resale price maintenance (or retail price maintenance) is a practice where the distributor agrees to sell at a price set by the manufacturer
⊙ a business scenario the Financial Times described as “hard to create, but (also) hard to disrupt”

Top Shelf Tesco, (Super)Market Leader: The Irresistible Rise of Britain’s Leading Grocer

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Commerce & Business, Regional History, Retailing history

In the UK’s highly competitive retail world Tesco plc is the kingpin grocer, at the top of the tree of Britain’s supermarket chains. With over 3,400 stores across the UK and a presence in around a dozen countries worldwide✱, Tesco pulled in revenue in 2017 to the tune of £55.9B. The retailer’s origins though, way back at the end of the Great War, were of course much more humble. Like fellow high-flying UK retailer, Marks and Spencer, it began with one man and a market stall operation.

Jack Cohen got the business ball rolling in 1919 with a basic stall✥ in the Well Street Market, Hackney, London…for start-up capital Cohen (born ‘Jacob Kohen’) had a £30 stipend from his recent WWI service. From his barrow and stall operation, the antecedent of Tesco, the 21-year-old started off selling matzos (unleavened Jewish crisp bread) and other army surplus food he had purchased. On opening day Cohen made a princely £1 profit from a grand total of £4 in sales [‘A History of Tesco: The rise of Britain’s biggest supermarket’, by Tim Clark and Szu Ping Chan, The Telegraph, 04-Oct-2014, www.telegraph.co.uk].

Genesis of the business name
In the early days, a big-ticket item that Cohen sold was tea from T E Stockwell (in fact the first product sold by Cohen under the Tesco brand). From the Stockwell name Cohen simply took the first three initials ‘T E S’ and added the first two letters of his own name ‘C O’ on to the end of it – thus forming the business’s famous name, ‘TESCO’ (and unsold “Stockwell Tea” got repackaged and rebranded as “Tesco Tea”).

From North London to the nation
Cohen opened his first shop in Burnt Oak, near Edgware, North London, in 1931. Within a short period he had built the company headquarters and a central warehouse also in North London (Edmonton). The London retailer’s strategy was twofold – to expand by gradually buying out smaller grocery stores, and to buy the unsold merchandise other grocers couldn’t sell, which he would repackage and rebrand and then on-sell it to the public cheaper than anyone else (earning himself the nickname ‘Slasher Jack’) [‘Tesco UK, brief history and overview’, www.eeph.org.uk].

Cohen’s business motto, and therefore the company’s motto, was “pile it high and sell it cheap”, a straight-forward business philosophy of “low cost and high volume”✪ along the line of the large Woolworths chain. One of Cohen’s “bargain basement” product mainstays was ‘Snowflake’, a New Zealand canned milk which accounted (together with Tesco Tea) for much of the early Tesco sales [Sarah Ryle, The Making of Tesco: A Story of British Shopping (2013)]. By 1939 there were in excess of 100 Tesco shops all round the United Kingdom. Where Cohen chose to locate a Tesco, seems according to his daughter (the future Conservative MP Dame Shirley Porter) to have been something of an intuitive hunch. As she later explained, they’d be driving around town and “he’d suddenly say ‘this looks like a good place for a shop’ and he’d leap out and chat a few people up”. This was the very hands-on way Cohen would conduct market research [Ryle, op.cit.].

First with self-serve
Jack Cohen’s introduction to the idea of self-service grocery outlets came on a visit to the US in 1935…Cohen was initially not impressed. The immediate postwar period in Britain was characterised by a hike in wholesale costs of goods, which could not be passed on to customers due to the burdens of postwar austerity. Cohen made a return visit to the US at this time, accompanied by his son-in-law Hymon Kreitman who was enthusiastic about the American self-serve concept as typified by the pioneering Piggly Wiggly supermarkets. Cohen, influenced by Kreitman, eventually opened Tesco’s (and Britain’s) very first self-service shop at St Albans (Herts.) in 1948 as a way of countering the rising costs of commodities. Another first for Tesco was the first supermarket in the UK, opened in 1958, located in Maldon, Essex (it featured separate counters for meat, butter and cheese) [‘Jack Cohen (businessman)’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

Maldon supermarket (interior) ⬇️

Expansionary growth
The 1950s and ’60s for Tesco was marked by unbounded expansion through the acquiring of many smaller grocery shops. Among the scalps of small retail outlets claimed by the burgeoning company were Burnards stores, Williamson’s shops, Harrow stores, Irwin’s shops, Charles Phillips’ shops and the Victor-Value chain (this last concern was unloaded by Tesco in the Eighties). Between 1955 and 1960 alone, Cohen bought over 500 new shops across the country [‘Tesco: How one supermarket came to dominate’, (Denise Winterman), BBC Magazine, 09-Sep-2013, www.bbc.com].

After Jack died in 1979 Tesco’s expansionary trajectory continued unabated…there was a hostile takeover of Hillards supermarket chain in 1987, the acquisition of William Low shops in 1994 gave them a greater market concentration in Scotland, as did the snaring of Associated British Foods three years later for Ireland and Northern Ireland. The Safeways/BP shops, and a move into convenience stores T&S Stores and Adminstore followed. The opening of Tesco’s Leicester “super-sized” store in 1961 made it, at that time, the largest grocery store in Europe. By the 1990s Tesco had overtaken Sainsbury’s as Britain’s largest food retailer. So extensive has been the spread of Tesco shops, it is thought that only one postcode in the entire UK – Harrogate in North Yorkshire – doesn’t have a Tesco in it! [Clark & Chan, op.cit.].

Diversifying Tesco
From the Sixties Tesco started to diversify in a big way! To the traditional staple of grocery lines were added clothing, books, furniture, software, internet services and in 1974 the sale of petrol. The Tesco Bank (financial services) was launched in a joint venture with the Royal Bank of Scotland, and later gained a foothold in the communications field with the advent of Tesco Mobile [‘Tesco’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

Diversification also meant a dilution of Slasher Jack’s traditional retail philosophy of providing only the cheapest of the cheap. This change-up saw Tesco for the first time add upmarket quality items to its catalogues. The physical nature of Tesco’s retail outlets diversified during this period. To the standard supermarket format was added hypermarkets (called Tesco Extra) at one end of the spectrum, and “one stop” shops/neighbourhood convenience stores (Tesco Express) at the other. In between these polarities were Tesco Metro and Tesco Superstores. Such market manoeuvrability by Tesco has drawn praise from business analysts – Citigroup’s David McCarthy acknowledges Tesco’s capacity to “appeal to all segments of the market” [‘Tesco: Supermarket Superpower’, (Hannah Liptrot), 03-Jun-2005, www.bbc.com]. It has also been (reluctantly) commended by a critic of the grocery Goliath for its “clinical efficiency with which it carries out its business plan” [Andrew Simms, Tescopoly: How One Shop Came Out on Top and Why it Matters, (2007)].

Tesco Malaysia

Internationalising Tesco
Inevitably, growth and profitability at home meant external expansion for Tesco, a move towards globalisation. The company acquired various overseas market footholds with majority stake holdings in established Turkish supermarket chain Kipar and in Polish Leader Price wspanialy-rynki (supermarkets), among others. The overseas results however have tended to fall well short of Tesco’s stellar domestic performance. A 2006 move into the US market with the Fresh & Easy chain was unsuccessful, resulting in a £1.2B loss and in 2013 Tesco completed their pull-out from North America [‘Wikipedia’, op.cit.].

Inverness high street

Too big, too damaging?
The phenomenal retail success of Tesco ⌖ is encapsulated by the popular phrase in Britain, “£1 in every seven went into a Tesco till!” Inverness in the Scotland Highlands (known locally as ‘Tesco Town’) personifies the dominance of Tesco – 50p in every £1 spent on food, it is calculated, is derived from one of Tesco’s three shops in the northern city [Liptrot, loc.cit.; ‘The supermarket that ate a town’, (Lorna Martin), The Guardian, 01-Jan-2006, www.theguardian.com]. Other cities and towns across the UK share Inverness’ concerns of urban domination by the retailer…Seaton in Devon’s east is staring at the prospect of becoming another “Tesco Town”. Tesco has flagged plans to build a superstore, hundreds of ‘Tesco’ homes and a hotel in the small town, triggering determined local opposition to the scheme [‘This town has been sold to Tesco’, (Anna Minton), The Guardian, 05-May-2010, www.theguardian.com].

Ultimately, it is Tesco’s size that courts the company’s most strident criticism and opposition. Increasingly, the sheer size and scale of the supermarket empire gives it a disproportionate degree of bargaining power with manufacturers. Since 2000 the British authorities have sought to address the uncompetitive nature of the status quo, a code of practice was enacted in that year to try to curb Tesco’s (and other large retail players’) market dominance to the serious detriment of small traders in the UK (the National Consumer Council has described Tesco as “the Marmite of British business”). Interestingly, consumer surveys in the UK point to the consumer public’s “Janus-headed” take on Tesco, it ranks as both the “most trusted” and the “least trusted” of companies in the country! [David Gray (Analyst, Planet Retail), quoted in Winterman, op.cit.]. The recent Tesco takeover of Booker Wholesale Group (2017/18) for £3.7B, given the green light by the UK’s competition watchdog (CMA), has however provoked widespread disquiet within those in British society concerned at what they see as yet another monopolistic move for the retail behemoth [‘Tesco’s £3.7bn Booker takeover waved through by competition regular’, (A Armstrong & J Torrance), The Telegraph (UK), 20-Dec-2017, www.telegraph.co.uk].

Ripples in the Tesco ocean
The hostility of small retailers at Tesco’s strangulation of competition in the supermarket field❅ is not the only discordant note in Tesco’s recent history. Its high public profile has prompted at least two attempts at extortion using the threat of letter bombs…in 2000-2001 an individual tried to extort £5M from the supermarket giant (he was subsequently caught and jailed for 16 years); later a former tax inspector demanding £1M from Tesco, tried the same method (also apprehended and imprisoned). Tesco has tended to court controversy on occasions, eg, quantities of horsemeat were discovered in burgers and spaghetti sold by Tesco, and of course almost a by-product of runaway commercial success, there has been a slew of charges over the years that Tesco was engaging in tax avoidance schemes, tax minimisation, etc. Tesco was heavily criticised by the CEO of UNICEF UK in 2009 for appropriating the children’s charity’s slogan “Change for Good” and crassly using it for commercial advantage in company advertising [‘Unicef accuses Tesco of misusing charity slogan’, (Marie O’Halloran), The Irish Times, 25-Jul-2009, www.irishtimes.com]. As well there have been isolated incidences of individual Tesco shops discriminating against blind people (especially barring entry) [‘Tesco’, Wikipedia, op.cit.]. Tesco’s corporate response after such periodical outbreaks of bad PR has been to launch charm offensives aimed at the public (such as its “Good neighbour” policy in the 2000s) [Simms, loc,cit.].

Until very recently Tesco has experienced seemingly unstoppable success. However things troughed for the retailer during financial years 2013-14 and 2014-15, in the latter year Tesco lost £6.4B, its worse fiscal performance in 20 years! [Clark & Chan, op.cit.]. Since then the supermarket chain (boosted by acquiring the Booker cash and carry group) has to no one’s surprise bounced back, in 2018 recording its strongest growth in seven years (UK and Irish sales rose 3.5%). It has also just introduced Jack’s stores which it hopes will wrest back losses in the discount store market from front runners, German supermarket heavyweights, Aldi and Lidl [‘Tesco posts highest growth in seven years’, (Sarah Butler), The Guardian 15-Jun-2018, www.theguardian.com].

PostScript: Tesco to (super)market leader
What makes Tesco a cut above its rivals? Enormity of size and utter ruthlessness and aggression in business dealings has been a factor, but according to some observers, the key to its success has been its ability to read customer behaviour: going way back Tesco has been meticulous about collecting raw data on what consumers were buying, invaluable information for anticipating future patterns, staying ahead of the curve! Tesco introduced loyalty schemes, personalised discounts and rewards for its customers, above all the Tesco Clubcard (“Every little helps”) – the card was an immediate hit, within a year of its debut (1995), Clubcard holders were spending 28% more at its stores and Tesco was number 1 with a bullet in the rankings of British grocers [Winterman, loc.cit; ‘The card up their sleeve’, The Guardian 19-Jul-2003, www.theguardian.com].

〦〦〦〦〦〦〦〦〦〦〦〦〦〦〦〦〦〦〦〦〦〦〦〦〦〦〦〦〦〦〦〦〦〦〦
✱ including stores in Ireland, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Malaysia, India, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Thailand (and previously in the US)
✥ his precise start in the world of retail sales was in fact as a barrow boy
✪ to which he added an internal one, actually a motivational pitch for sales staff, “YCDBSOYA” (You Can’t Do Business Sitting On Your Arse”) [‘Shirley Porter: Rich, flashy and corrupt with it. She’s nothing like a Dame’, (Sean O’Grady), The Independent, 16-Dec-2001, www.theindependent.co.uk]
⌖ fifth biggest grocery chain in the world, biggest UK retailer by sales, biggest UK employer (>330,000 staff) [Winterman, loc.cit.]
❅ for instance, the Office of Fair Trading investigated the company for allegedly forming a cartel of supermarkets (with Safeway, Asda, Morrisons and Sainsbury’s) to fix the price of dairy products

Marks and Spencer: From a Kirkgate Penny Bazaar to London High Street Heavyweights

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Commerce & Business, Local history, Retailing history

Before the principals of Marks and Spencer teamed up, the entity was singular, just the one aspiring retailer, Michael Marks, and of material necessity he started very small. A late 19th century immigrant refugee from the Russian Empire’s Byelorussian region, Marks launched his first penny bazaar stall in Central Leeds’ Kirkgate Market with start-up funding amounting to one £5 note – which he had borrowed! Marks met his future partner at this time, Thomas Spencer, and eventually went into business with him after the latter, a Yorkshire cashier, invested £300 for a half-share in what became Marks and Spencer✱.

Early days: Establishing a chain of “penny bazaars”
Michael Marks kicked off with a very basic business model: his initial stall in Leeds was a “one penny stall”, hence the business’ motto, “Don’t ask the price, its a penny”⊡. The early stall commodities focused on household goods, haberdashery, toys and a sheet-music business (note the early spelling of the store name with an errant plural ‘s’ in ‘Spencer’ in the photo at left). Marks (the more dynamic and “hands-on” of the partners) immediately set about expanding the business, first up establishing a shop in Manchester. By 1894 Marks and Spencer had graduated to a permanent stall in Leeds’ covered market (in 1904 they opened their first Leeds shop) and in 1901 concentrated its open market operation in Birkenhead on Merseyside.

Forging a regional retail identity
The two partners initially focussed locally, concentrating on Yorkshire and Lancashire, a new warehouse in Manchester (1897) became the early centre of the M&S business empire which numbered 36 branches by that time…the firm accumulated stalls (later on, shops) in towns and cities across the North of England (Manchester, Liverpool, Hull, Sheffield, Middlesbrough and Sunderland) as well as further south (Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Swansea, etc) [‘The History of Marks and Spencer’, (h2g2, 2008/2012), www.h2g2.com].

Spencer
Marks

By the early 1900s Marks and Spencer was starting to yield a very tidy surplus, becoming a limited company in 1903. At this juncture Thomas Spencer decided to cash in and retire from the partnership with a nice “nest egg” of £15,000 (for his initial outlay of £300) [‘Thomas Spencer (Marks and Spencer)’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. Sadly for both Spencer and Marks, neither got to enjoy their monetary success long – Spencer died in 1905, followed by Marks in 1907. Nonetheless the prestigious company name has long outlived the two founding principals, thriving into the 21st century.

The end of “British-only” and “home-brand only”
In the early 20th century M&S, entering into long-term relationships with British manufacturers, emphasised a policy of selling only British-manufactured goods, clothes and food were sold under the famous “St Michael” brand (named after founder Michael Marks). The fluctuating commercial fortunes of the company in the 1990s led to M&S relenting somewhat on this policy.

Textiles and food
By the Twenties M&S had moved into the sale of textiles in a big way (launching its own laboratories to commercially produce new fabrics for the British market). In 1931 it added food to its portfolio of products…M&S’s own food technology department (from 1948) allowed it to offer chilled poultry to customers, instead of the hitherto frozen or pre-cooked options (courtesy of a new technology it called “cold chain distribution”) [‘What 130 years of M&S history can teach us about innovation”, (Hannah Jenkinson, 2018), www.about.futurelearn.com].

By the 1960s these two commodities, textiles and food, were firmly ensconced as the staples of Marks and Spencer. M&S were forerunners in introducing retail practices that enhanced customer satisfaction, such as the “money-back, no questions asked, no time limit” policy.

Marble Arch – M&S flagship store ⬆

In 1930 Marks and Spencer established itself in the United Kingdom’s financial capital, opening a mega-sized London store at 458 Oxford Street, W1. The Marble Arch store which was to become the company’s flagship store, would go on to compete with those other leading retailers of quality merchandise already with abase in Oxford Street, Selfridge’s and John Lewis’. Marble Arch wasn’t in fact M&S’s first retail outlet in London, that honour went to the one in nearby Edgware Road (which is actually closer to the Marble Arch monument than the Marble Arch M&S!). The Edgware Road store began as a penny bazaar in 1912 with additional floors added in the 1920s. During World War II the building was damaged by German incendiary bombs (as was Marble Arch tube station in an earlier Nazi air raid). In 1959 the original store at Nº228 Edgware Road was closed and replaced by a new, much bigger store at 258-264 Edgware which opened just six days later [‘The History of Marks & Spencer Edgware Road’, (Jan. 2017), www.marble-arch.london].

Nº228 Edgware (Source: M&S Co Archive) ⬇

M&S shift of strategy in an increasingly volatile retail market
At the turn of the 21st century Marks and Spencer’s prospects appeared fairly sanguine…in 1998 it became the first British retailer to achieve a pre-tax profit of over £1B.

But in the first decade of this century, M&S, sensing the need to compete for more of the market, made some seismic changes. The standard–bearer St Michael’s brand was dropped, other longtime lines were rebranded. The company moved away from its emphasis on “British quality goods”, starting to sell big-name grocery lines like Marmite, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and KitKats in its stores [‘Marks and Spencer to start selling top brands’, (G Hiscott), The Mirror (UK), 04-Nov-2009, www.mirror.co.uk] (previously it had concentrated on ‘luxury’ food products exclusively). This marks the recognition by Marks and Spencer that the falling trend of clothing sales needed to be heavily supplemented by popular food items.

Marks and Spencer (colloquially and affectionately known on the street as “Marks and Sparks”) as at April 2017 could list a total of 959 operating stores across the UK✣, 615 of which traded in food only (the “Simply Food” label), evidence of how food products had come to prop up the other traditional areas of the business. Future prospects for the major British retailer remain somewhat nebulous after the company signalled in 2018 its intent to close around 100 M&S stores in the country by 2022. Retail finance watchers have also questioned, with such a reliance on food items, whether M&S can ultimately match it with the UK’s food and groceries powerhouse Tesco [‘M&S online food delivery service will be no piece of cake’, Robert Plummer, BBC News, 28-Apr-2017, www.bbc.com]. Still, Marks and Spencer remains in majority British hands (unlike its rival heavyweights Harrods and Selfridges).


⬆ Commemorative M&S clock in Leeds market

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✱ the foundation date for the company is traditionally given as 1884, however the exact date the partnership began between Marks and Spencer seems conjectural – other candidates are from 1894 (the Leeds permanent stall) or from 1901 (the Birkenhead market)
⊡ product inexpensiveness was not to stay the M&S catch cry – by the late 1920s Simon Marks (the founder’s son who had assumed the reins) placed a 5/- limit on items. Long before this M&S had made the store focus one of quality over cheapness
✣ plus over 200 overseas stores in at least 40 countries

John Lewis, Senior and Junior: A Contrast in Pathways Up the Retailing Ladder

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Biographical, Commerce & Business, Local history, Retailing history

The path taken by John Lewis in scaling the heights of retail commerce was typical of many embryonic and aspiring owner-drapers in mid-Victorian Britain. Somerset born and raised, Lewis started his first modest shop in Nº132 (later re-numbered) Oxford Street, London, in 1864 (taking the sum of 16s & 4d on opening day). His first twenty years in business for himself were far from glamorous, a period dominated by hard and dreary ‘yakka’ and slow piecemeal accumulation and consolidation.

The tortoise approach – slow and steady
Lewis took a conservative, uncomplicated (“keep it simple”) approach to retailing and only slowly moved his lines from silks, woollens and cotton fabrics to dress fabrics and clothing and later to furnishing fabrics and household supplies like China and ironmongery (but never food!). His philosophy was sell cheap and no ads (for nearly a century the John Lewis company continued a practice of minimal advertising!)✱. Unsurprisingly for a man described as “a Victorian curmudgeon” [‘John Lewis (1836-1928)’, Geoffrey Tweedale, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 06-Jan-2011, www.oxfordnb.com], his management style was rigidly autocratic, he often had abysmally poor relations with his staff and was prone to effecting arbitrary and sometimes wholesale dismissals. In 1920 Lewis’ “pig-headedness” and anti-union stance triggered deleterious industrial conflict…in 1920 the unaddressed grievances of Lewis’ shop-girls led to a strike by 400 staff. Lewis simply sacked the strikers and replaced them, but his arbitrary action brought him discredit and caused commercial ruptures adversely affected the company’s competitiveness vis-à-vis its retailing rivals in the long-term. ‘How John Lewis was the original store wars: As the retail empire celebrates 150 years, we tell its fascinating story’, (Brian Viner), The Daily Mail (UK),, 04-Jul-2014, www.dailymail.co.uk]

ef=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/image-1.jpg”> Flagship store 1939 (Source: John Lewis Memory)[/cap
Lewis adopted an habitually “penny-pinching” stance when it came to running the store’s finances. In this he was the diametrically opposite of his Selfridges contemporary, the ostentatious, big spending, big advertising Harry Gordon Selfridge. In the eyes of Lewis, Selfridge must have seemed absolutely criminally profligate! Nonetheless Lewis did earn “brownie points” with London consumers for his straight dealing and commitment to the purveyance of quality goods, and profits grew accordingly. Sales for the ‘John Lewis’ stores rose from an underwhelming £25,000 in 1870 to a commendable £921,000 in 1921.

http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/image-2.jpg”> Peter Jones[/caption
Another instance of Lewis’s circumspect approach was his reluctance to expand the business. It was not until 1906 that he made a move in this direction, purchasing the ailing Peter Jones store in Chelsea after the death of the store’s original Welsh owner✧. During his long lifetime John Lewis made no further expansionary attempts. The company during this period was clearly hamstrung by a lack of dynamic vision under its founder – losing vital retail ground to the likes of Whiteleys and Owen Owen [Tweedale, loc.cit.].

Father v son
Lewis’s innate caution also showed itself in his hesitancy in passing even a portion of control of the firm over to his sons, especially his eldest son John Spedan Lewis. When Lewis’s sons came of age, he gave them a limited role only…Spedan (as he was universally called) was put in charge of the newly acquired Peter Jones store (presumably to keep him from interfering with the central operation of the business). Spedan increasingly clashed with Lewis Senior over their fundamentally different approaches to business, with Spedan in charge of Peter Jones and JL Senior holding sway in Oxford Street HQs, relations between father and son deteriorated alarmingly (characterised in some quarters as equating to intra-family “store wars”) [Viner, loc.cit].

After the founder’s death in 1928 Spedan was free to fully implement his more progressive management ideas – in the area of staff relations these were often light years away from his father’s outmoded views and intransigent bellicosity…once at the helm Lewis Junior started by cutting working hours and introduced tea-breaks for the staff…Spedan envisaged further, more radical, plans for modernising ‘John Lewis’ and propelling it forward in the Thirties.

Under Spedan’s watch – JLP up and away!
Spedan wasted no time in taking ‘John Lewis’ in a very different direction to his late father’s ultra-cautious, steady-as-it-goes approach. In 1929 he reformed the enterprise into a public limited company, John Lewis Partners (JLP). Staff were rebranded ‘partners’ and made shareholders in the firm. Spedan diversified and pursued an expansionary route that Lewis Senior had so long doggedly eschewed. Smaller, less profitable chains were acquired – from 1933 on Spedan widened the John Lewis Partnership dramatically, adding purchased stores for the first time outside of London – Nottingham, Weston Super-Mare, Portsmouth and Tyrrel, Southampton, etc. [‘The 1930’s; a period of growth’, (Johnathan Blanchford), (‘John Lewis Memory Store’), www.johnlewismemorystore.org.uk]. One of JL Junior’s ideas was to create a chain of John Lewis hotels, and to supply these hotels he bought a chain of grocery shops, known as Waitrose, in the Thirties. Waitrose proved a spectacularly profitable acquisition for John Lewis’⊛. As of 2016 there were some 353 Waitrose supermarkets across the UK, collectively worth more than £1B (one of only five such successful food and drink brands in Britain) [‘Waitrose’, Wikipedia]http://en.m.wikipedia.org.

In the Forties John S Lewis bought up some of the failing Selfridge business concerns after the former high-flying company plummeted and Harry Selfridge was forced out to pasture and into retirement. Other (overseas) business moves into South African draperies however turned out to be unsuccessful ventures [‘John Lewis’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

▼ Spedan Lewis

Although Spedan was less autocratic, and certainly less confrontational✣, than his father, he was no democrat when it came to running the John Lewis business empire. Some observers (including insiders), recognising an inherited family trait, saw Lewis Junior as a “my way or the highway” type of business leader. Recollections of some ex-staff and associates point at a Spedan inclination to public losses of temper and the arbitrary and unfair treatment of staff on occasions, with a suggestion of a peculiar bias against staff (including managers) with ginger hair [‘Memories of Spedan – not all sweetness and light’, (Margaret Cole), (‘John Lewis Memory Store’), www.johnlewismemorystore.org.uk].

Today JLP remains an employee-owned British company (consistent with the “worker-cooperative” entity (the ‘Partnership’) as initiated by Spedan Lewis in 1929). According to the Sunday Times it is the third largest private UK company by sales – £3.78B revenue in 2017 [“The Sunday Times HSBC Top Track 100 league” (2016)]. As a retail operator JLP maintain its traditional market position as a chain of high-end✫ department stores⊡, competing with its historic, equally upscale rivals in the merchandising field, Harrods and Selfridges.

FN: the corporate colours of retailing
John Lewis’s store colours have traditionally been green and white – supposedly because Spedan Lewis wrote his memos exclusively in green ink (the auditor’s colour!) on white paper [Tweedale, loc.cit.]. Interestingly, green seems to be the preferred colour of successful London-based retailers…Selfridges’ salient business colour is also green, and both Harrod’s and Marks and Spencer’s traditional hues are green and gold.

2013: John Lewis presence in Westfield’s Shepherds Bush mall ∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸
✱ the John Lewis motto (dating from 1925) characteristically is “never knowingly undersold”
✧ the sale was the stuff of legend in London retailing – Lewis reportedly walked the distance from Oxford Street to the Sloane Square, Chelsea, Jones premises, with bank notes in his pocket to the value of £20,000 to complete the purchase in person. Today, Peter Jones is the ‘posher’ sibling of the John Lewis store
⊛ Waitrose is an upmarket grocer in line with the general emphasis of John Lewis merchandising
✣ JL Senior’s quarrelsome, confrontational nature was often fraught with consequences – a protracted turn-of-the-century legal dispute with Lord Howard, Baron de Walden, saw Lewis being sentenced to three weeks in gaol in 1903 for contempt of court [‘How John Lewis ended up in prison. A new century same old Mr Lewis’, (J Blanchford), (‘John Lewis Memory Store’), www.johnlewismemorystore.org.uk]
✫ a monumental departure from the early days of JL Senior’s “sell cheap” strategy
⊡ currently around 30 JL stores in England, Scotland and Wales and concessions in the Republic of Ireland and Australia