The Retail Week – February 22, 2008

He had worked himself up into a Basil Fawlty-esque frenzy because every Friday, Retail-week.com seemed to feature a story with some variant of the headline “Stunning Week for John Lewis”.

His e-mail ended with the memorable line: “I expect next week you’ll be announcing that Charlie Mayfield has been appointed the next Pope.”

He actually had a point. Thanks to its admirably open approach, every week John Lewis lays its performance open to scrutiny and, through most of last year, it seemed to sail through the turbulence affecting the market with an effortlessness – critics might even call it smugness – that made its rivals green with envy.

But this week, our angry reader will be happy. While the overall figure still looks okay thanks to the internet and John Lewis’s new Cambridge store, the established department stores are having a tougher time. Last week, Retail Week pointed out that half the stores showed a like-for-like decline in the financial year that ended last month and, this morning, the partnership said trading last week was “one of the toughest in recent memory”.

So is this the end of the fairytale? Certainly the performance is the weakest I can remember in three years editing Retail Week, and the double-digit drops in eight stores last week – some of almost as much as 20 per cent – will certainly give food for thought. One or two people have begun to whisper that John Lewis might have started to believe its own hype and that the renowned service proposition might not be living up to its remarkable reputation.

While there will doubtless be things that managing director Andy Street would like done better, the real story isn’t that dramatic. As confirmed by many in the market who don’t have to disclose their figures weekly, February has been a really tough month.

The start of the year is always a bit of an anticlimax after Christmas and the January Sales, but the sunny weather has has meant that cash-strapped consumers have headed to the park or the countryside rather than the shops over the half-term weeks.

John Lewis hasn’t stopped being a class operation overnight and remains the gold standard among the department store operators. The story in today’s numbers isn’t about John Lewis, it’s about the market.