Provocation: Marks and Spencer quotes, comments and opinions from people

I like Marks and Spencers, and so do a lot of my friends and colleagues, though not all of them. The prevailing opinion is that they get a bad rap, but perhaps my local area’s viewpoint is skewed by having Britain’s – and therefore probably the World’s – largest M&S on our doorstep, at The Meadows in Camberley.

Me, I started going back to M&S when I discovered that they were finally stocking decently-fitting shirts in my size as-of about two years ago. Since that time I have probably spent £900+ in the shop.

My problem was that there was a period in the 80s/90s when shops thought that if you had a 17.5″ collar size therefore (a) you were approximately as wide as a whisky barrel and (b) either had short arms that stuck-out at rightangles to your trunk, or you were 7-foot-6 with limbs to match. It wasn’t just M&S who did this, but it was a dire time to be buying clothes – if you were merely proportionately large then nothing looked good, so you didn’t care anyway. I’ve just junked a pile of shirts from that era, you could get two of me into most of them – except at the collar.

So sometime – perhaps shortly after working out that letting people pay with credit-cards would be a good idea – they must have chucked their designers and taken a look at real people. The variety, fit and service is still not as good as (say) Nordstrom where I can order combinations of collar and arm length (17.5×38!) but in general the product is fabulously better than 10 years ago.

What else? Well, the men’s underwear department has expanded greatly – which is all to the good; cited from the perspective of married female colleagues, their men will accept anything with a M&S logo as being “safe” irrespective of fashion, providing an opportunity for “stealth makeovers” of their husbands.

The big shop near me expends great effort toward soft-furnishing and dining; personally I think they could cut that out and cede the battle to IKEA and the like; unless they do something radical there, they’ll not regain mindshare to the Vikings, let alone DFS

The M&S foodstores are very popular with my friends, especially the motorway-service ones; yes it’s terribly middle-slass but it is so much nicer to get a fresh chicken-caesar wrap and a carrot cake when driving home in the late evening on the M4; for mornings, yes, you want pork pies and greasy-spoon breakfasts, but not after 7pm.

So, generally I’m bullish about M&S, and I and many of my happily-shopping colleagues are at a loss to explain why the media and markets are so down on them.