Marks and Spencer began in 1884 as a market stall in Leeds run by Michael Marks, a Polish-Jewish refugee, whose sign read “Don’t ask the price, it’s a penny”. He went into partnership with the cashier Thomas Spencer ten years later, and the company has been on British high streets ever since.
What it is for
M&S occupies an unusual position: not luxury, not budget, and enormously freighted with class signalling. It sells:
- Food — the part that has kept the company alive. Ready meals, prepared ingredients, and a chilled range of a quality well above the supermarket average.
- Underwear — genuinely a national institution, and for decades the default source for a large share of the country.
- Clothing — the perennial problem. M&S has spent thirty years being accused of dressing people older than they are, and the womenswear business in particular has been reinvented repeatedly.
- Homeware, flowers and a café.
The food advertising
One of the most successful campaigns in British advertising history, and one that has entered the language. From 2004, M&S ran food adverts with slow-motion close-ups and a breathy voiceover ending: “This is not just food. This is M&S food.”
The formulation “this is not just X, this is M&S X” is now a standard British construction, used sarcastically about anything slightly overpriced. Sales rose substantially, and rival supermarkets spent years parodying it.
St Michael
For most of the twentieth century M&S sold almost everything under its own brand, St Michael — named after founder Michael Marks. The company was famous for buying overwhelmingly from British manufacturers and for auditing its suppliers closely, and at one point around 90% of what it sold was made in Britain.
That sourcing model was abandoned in the late 1990s as costs made it untenable, which was a genuine national story at the time and cost thousands of manufacturing jobs. The St Michael brand was retired in 2000.
The class thing
M&S sits at a very specific point on the British social map, and everybody knows where. It is where you buy a birthday cake if you want it to look like you made an effort, where you buy a sandwich if you are having a nicer lunch than usual, and where an older generation buys its clothes without embarrassment.
“Percy Pigs” — the company’s pig-shaped sweets — have a cult following that is entirely disproportionate to what they are, and the Christmas food range is planned for by households in advance.
The long turnaround
M&S has been in some form of turnaround for about twenty-five years, and its problems are well documented: too many stores, too much floor space in the wrong places, a clothing offer squeezed between fast fashion below and department stores above.
The strategy has been to close and shrink stores, push food — including a partnership with Ocado for online delivery — and gradually modernise the clothing. Recent results have been better than they have been for a long time, and the company remains, for a great many British people, less a shop than a fixed point.