Marks & Spencer Make It Easy In-Store

his article titled "Marks and Spencer gambles on bringing internet age to the shop floor" was written by Zoe Wood, for The Observer on Saturday 1st September 2012 23.03 UTC

Bronwyn - proudly patting herself down and establishing that under her clothes and smart, hot-pink anorak it's just the "bra and knickers" that have been bought at her favourite store - says: "I'm an M&S lady."

The 62-year-old retired social worker was one of hundreds of shoppers crowding the aisles of the new Marks & Spencer superstore at Cheshire Oaks in Ellesmere Port when it opened last week. With a shop-floor area equivalent to the size of 11 Olympic swimming pools, the vast store - codenamed "concept 11″ - is M&S's best crack to date at merging the worlds of physical and online shopping.

M&S is trying to please loyal shoppers like Bronwyn who arrive at its stores armed with mobile phones in their handbags that have more computing power than the average PC of a decade ago. "I'm one of the older generation - we get called silver surfers - who are switched on to modern technology," she explains.

With the internet now part of the fabric of modern life, M&S's digital guru Laura Wade-Gery, is firm: "The high street is not going to stand still so we know that we can't." The executive, who was hired from Tesco last year, is behind the retailer's growing arsenal of interactive shopping technology. "How do we use the internet to reinvent the store?" she asks. "It's as big a mission as that."

In the Cheshire store, customers are invited to use "browse and order" hubs kitted out with giant touchscreens that look like they have been stolen from the Teletubbies. The latest clothing lines and home fashions are beamed from 70in "inspirational" displays, with additional backup provided by assistants prowling the shop floor armed with holstered iPads, ready to plug the gap between the thousands of products hanging on the rails and those out there in cyberspace.

The striking store, which has a curvy wooden roof made of "glulam" (glued laminate) and hemp walls, might be M&S's greenest to date, but in the six long years it has taken to come to fruition it has increasingly been argued that big stores are growing obsolete, as shoppers defect to the virtual high street.

M&S boss Marc Bolland admitted at the opening that if he could have turned back the clock, the monster store would have been "a tad smaller". At 151,000 sq ft it is unlikely M&S will ever open such a large branch again. But with a catchment of 1.3 million people and £4bn of local retail sales to go after, Bolland insisted it was not just a large store, but rather "a shopping experience".

The shadow cast by the internet and now mobile shopping has spawned retail industry buzzwords such as "multichannel" and even "omnichannel", which attempt to describe how customers increasingly use both store and websites in tandem. Jargon aside, retailers find that the more channels their customers use, the more they spend. M&S says shoppers who shop on its website as well in its stores spend four times as much; throw smartphones into the mix and they spend eight times as much.