Of Chopin and McDonald’s

I’ve seen the value future and it’s McDonald’s in Brent Cross. Saturday afternoon and the north London shopping centre was heaving with tired shoppers looking for a quick bite and a Big Mac was one of the more obvious choices on the route back to the multi-storey car park.

What was surprising was less that there was one of the burger restaurant chain’s better-looking outlets in situ, but that in the middle of it there was a grand piano. The instrument was being played by a Romanian music student, making fine work of everything from Robbie Williams to Chopin (Chopin mostly, at your correspondent’s request).

It was adding a certain je ne sais quoi that you just wouldn’t expect in a branch of the Golden Arches and the punters were, well, “lovin it”: most of them anyway. What it did do was transform a perfectly mundane occasion into something special and other than the space being occupied by the piano, it was costing McDonald’s very little indeed. A happy scene all round then.

Now think about where else you tend to see a piano being played in a retail environment. Those who’ve visited a branch of upscale department store Nieman Marcus in the US might expect to see something of the kind and for those with long memories, a piano and player formed part of the proposition at Debenhams on Oxford Street in the 1980s.

The thing is, you wouldn’t expect to see this in a value environment and yet it seemed to be just fine here. Now imagine putting a piano or some other form of free entertainment in the café of the just-opened John Lewis At Home store in Croydon. The place is already pretty good, but it would be better still if the obvious enthusiasm on show at Brent Cross were to be replicated.

This would still hardly be value however so on a broader scale, perhaps a fire breather in Matalan or fresh fruit jugglers in Lidl might lighten the atmosphere. Facetious perhaps, but even in the most cost-led environments, there is little to say that a small dose of occasional theatre on a Saturday afternoon, wouldn’t come amiss.

The other point is, how many times have you sat in the “restaurant” offered by a high street retailer and stifled a yawn or tried to dodge the mild sense of depression that is an ever-present danger? The answer is likely to be frequently and if you’re a retailer, you should be asking yourself what should be done to alleviate this. Well-fed, watered, and happy, yes happy, shoppers will probably feel more inclined to dig deep.