JUST how many retailers do ordinary shoppers feel they know and — up to a point — care about? Two thumbs will serve for most of us. Marks & Spencer is one. John Lewis (including Peter Jones and Waitrose) is the other. Shopping at John Lewis is a marker of middle-classdom. The presence of a Waitrose in any area is an infallible indicator that its house prices are only going up. And when, as now, John Lewis is going through a crisis, that’s news.
Today there is one of the company’s biannual meetings where staff representatives, councillors, vote on how happy they are with the company’s direction and the boss’s performance. And it seems they are vexed and discontented — John Lewis chair Dame Sharon White is in for a rough ride.
She has intimated that the group’s corporate identity may change. Instead of the company being more or less owned by its employees — they’re known as “partners”, as my branch of Waitrose brags — she’s thinking of selling some of the company’s equity to outsiders. That compromises the John Lewis model which goes right back to Spedan Lewis, son of the original John Lewis, who had the radical idea in 1920 of turning Peter Jones employees into partners with a share of the profits. There aren’t many exemplars in Britain of co-operative ownership and John Lewis is, by a mile, the most successful. She also is thinking of developing the flats above the company’s stores, which, I suppose, is an extension of Spedan Lewis’s idea of letting employees have rooms above the store. If I thought I could have a flat above Peter Jones, I’d be sending in a job application to Dame Sharon right now. Alas, it would more likely go for the market rate.
All this follows the withholding of a bonus from partners for a second year, the near inevitable closure of some branches and the possibility of job cuts. This isn’t what the partnership model was meant to look like.
It’s not just the workers who are exercised about where all this is leading. Mary Portas, the shop guru, said in an open letter that John Lewis was one of the most “valued, loved, and trusted retail brands” in the UK but that it had “let go” of its soul.
And so say all of us, we shoppers who like to think that the girl on the till has a stake in the business. Don’t ruin it.
