LIVERPOOL’S new John Lewis department store is continuing to “prosper”, despite the retail giant yesterday revealing plummeting weekly sales.
Sales in its 27 UK stores declined by 8.3% to £48.7m in the week to last Saturday, following on from the 5.6% decline seen in the previous week.
However, the Liverpool outlet, which opened as the anchor store in the new £1bn Liverpool One development at the end of May, continues to exceed sales expectations.
In September, LDP Business revealed the store had exceeded its sales budget by 14% in the first three months of operation.
The five-storey, 240,000 sq ft shop is the group’s biggest outside London and employs 860 people.
Because it’s a new store, the company does not publish year-on-year sales comparisons, but in a statement it said: “Of the three new branches, Leicester was helped by strong trade in catering, beauty and furnishing advice.
“Liverpool also prospered while in Cambridge, large electrical/ fitted kitchens led the way.”
The latest figures were for the week prior to the opening of the second phase of Liverpool One, which is set to bring even more shoppers into the development.
However, there was little optimism across the rest of the chain. The poor sales are being seen as a wider indication of how grim trading has become on Britain’s high streets.
Other individual John Lewis stores posted some big falls, with sales at Southampton and Bristol’s Cribbs Causeway down by almost a quarter on a year earlier. Waitrose – the supermarket arm of the John Lewis Partnership – also struggled as weekly sales dropped 0.7% to £73.6m.
Dan Knowles, selling operations director for the department store business, said the weather also contributed to the difficult week.
He added: “A combination of unseasonably sunny, warm weather and a huge amount of coverage of the global economic situation added together to give a very tough trading week.”
John Lewis said fitted kitchens, large electricals and flooring performed strongly as customers choose to improve their homes instead of moving.
The company said its home division continued to suffer, with sales diving 13.3% in the week to September 27.
Fashion sales were down 6%, and electricals and home technology fell 7.2%, John Lewis said.
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