Marks & Spencer is starting to look more like Whole Foods

Bloomberg

For a taste of CEO Steve Rowe’s ambitions to transform Marks & Spencer Group Plc, look no further than its newly refurbished shop in London’s Clapham neighbourhood.
The store looks more like a Whole Foods Market than one of the 135-year-old British retailer’s more traditional outlets. Alongside piles of avocados and herbs grown with the help of artificial intelligence — there are three kinds of basil — it features a wood-fired brick oven coated with glittering mirror tiles like those on disco balls.
What’s absent is just as important: The clothing that’s been a mainstay of the retailer’s large outlets for decades but has become a tough sell, hampering its turnaround efforts.
M&S, an institution in the UK, is threatened from all sides. Its business of selling both clothing and food has exposed it to competition from the likes of Amazon.com Inc as well as fast-fashion chains such as Zara and discount grocers like Lidl and Aldi.
Because of a shift towards online shopping and a Brexit-related slump in consumer confidence, UK retail is deep in a funk that has prompted chains like Debenhams Plc and House of Fraser to shut dozens of stores. Last month, M&S, one of the original members of the FTSE 100 Index, was kicked out of the stock benchmark for Britain’s biggest companies.
The new store moves the company beyond the comfort zone its food business has occupied until now — offering niche items and lunch fare like hoisin duck rolls that aim to make grocery shopping more exciting than a trip to the supermarket, at prices accessible to a middle-England clientele.
The company jazzed up the Clapham site further with other services, setting it apart from Marks & Spencer convenience stores.
The new style reflects a strategy that Stuart Machin, M&S food managing director, calls “protecting the magic and modernising the rest.” The company plans to open several similar stores before the end of the year to test whether they can turn around its fortunes.
With the new, larger stores, M&S is trying to change a perception that it’s just a convenience retailer “for tonight,” wrote Barclays analyst James Anstead.