No socks for you: Retail staff advising customers to shop online

When reporter Stephen Drill went shopping for schools socks he came back empty-handed – and with the realisation of why bricks and mortar stores are dying.

All I wanted was a pair of school socks for my son. It doesn’t sound that hard.

But welcome to shopping in the UK, where now even the staff at department stores are telling you to go online.

I was on the way back from covering a court case when I was going past Stratford in East London, home to a Westfield shopping centre that was built for the Olympics in 2012.

Feeling slightly nostalgic for my Westfield experiences in Australia, I jumped off the tube and went in.

The place has everything that opens and shuts, but not, I discovered, a pair of grey socks for a primary school student.

Shoppers might still be heading into bricks and mortar stores – but the staff advise to go online. Picture: Niklas Halle’n

Walking over the footbridge, I found my way to a super-sized Marks and Spencer store, which is somewhere around Myer and David Jones on the poshness scale.

There were more mannequins than customers.

Being a man, it took me a while to find the sock area, but when I did, they did not have the correct size in the school mandated colour.

I asked one uniformed staff member who said he didn’t work on that floor, then I went to the register.

Marks and Spencer is as posh as Australia’s Westfield but no socks in sight

The first desk I saw that had two staff members were returns only and told me to go to another spot nearby.

Their chatter prompted a woman who had camouflaged herself into the wall to get up from her seat and offer to serve me.

I decided I should be pragmatic and not go home empty-handed so I had picked up the wrong colour socks to buy.

When I asked if there were any other sizes or colours, the cash attendant replied: “You should try online.”

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Retails stores are increasingly empty of customers, who are going online instead. Picture: Attila Csaszar

The experience, while a one-off, is the canary in the coal mine for retailing in the UK where people are voting with their fingers and buying off their smartphones.

High Street shops are vacant, including quite a few near me, with charity shops dominating because they attract lower taxes than other businesses.

It’s so dire, there have been almost 3000 shops close this year, or 16 every day, in the first half of this year.

There are advertisements on the television from a credit card company encouraging people to shop on their high streets this Christmas.

But when a major department store cannot supply school socks, the retailers are not helping themselves.

Shops are shutting on the High Street

I rang Marks and Spencer during the week to ask them what their strategy was, and if they were happy with that service.

They politely called me back and apologised but did point out that 22 per cent of their clothing sales were now online and they planned to get that number to one-third.

Also, they argued that 70 per cent of their online orders were collected in store.

So, next time, I will stay on the tube and buy online.

I’ll give them one thing, the post office is pretty good here and delivers on Saturdays.