Marks & Spencer: With 100 stores slated to go staff are paying price for the failure of successive CEOs

“Vital,” is the word used for the plans in the press release. But vital is something M&S hasn’t been for a long time

M&S is planning to shut 100 of its clothing & home stores

M&S’s retreat from the High Street is fast becoming a rout. Having initially announced plans to close 30 Clothing & Home stores, the number of outlets facing the axe has increased to 100. They’re scheduled to be gone by 2022.

The locations of the next 14 have just been announced, following hot on the heels of an initial 21.

The uncomfortable choice facing the staff who work there is whether to try for a new role in the group, or take a pay off and see what else is out there. Deciding which way to jump will not be easy.

Thousands of people will be affected by the cull, which once again serves to highlight the continuing inability of the chain’s richly rewarded executives to come up with an answer to the question of what M&S is for on the modern high street.

Why would you go there for clothes when you can get perfectly acceptable quality a lot cheaper at Primark? Or the supermarkets?

“I really don’t know,” is what M&S’s middle class customer base has been saying. “I might go and have a look at what’s there because what I see here is about as exciting as doing the ironing when the broadband connection is down and I can’t watch Netflix. And it isn’t cheap either.”

While this has been going on, successive CEOs have made fortunes, because that’s what CEOs do. They’ve produced glossy ads. They’ve made a big fuss. They’ve got themselves in papers, sometimes surrounded by models. And the sales have just kept on falling, with words like “challenging” and “tough” regularly appearing in trading statements.

M&S’s workforce has good reason to feel cross about this. They might very well also look at the £1.64m the incumbent Steve Rowe received last year and ask: why?

They’ve worked hard for the company. They’ve smiled and put their best put forward and tried to sell the M&S ideal. They just haven’t had the products on the shelves behind them at a price their customers have been willing to pay. And they haven’t had the bosses with the imagination to chart a new course.

It’s now they who are paying the price for the failure of those bosses. And it’s a high one.

Even food, so often the bright spot, the thing that was played up in the trading statements because it was doing well, the horse Mr Rowe backed for the future, has been treading water. Again the question “why am I paying a premium” is being asked. No wonder, with so many households’ budgets under pressure.

If your job is in PR I suppose you could portray the latest announcement as evidence of decisive action, what is needed to cope with the accelerating move of shoppers online. “Vital,” is the word used in the press release. But vital is something M&S hasn’t been for a long time.

The City didn’t buy it. There was a brief flurry of interest in the shares before they went into reverse as investors started to fret about what might be in the forthcoming trading statement. How bad’s it going to be?

Bad, I’d imagine, which leads to one more uncomfortable question: will this ultimately be seen as the beginning of the end?