Marks and Spencer

Cant say I care for the clothes etc but the prepared foods, wow I miss this place sooooo much.Now just have to figure out how to convince them to open in Atlanta ;-)

I'm a big fan of M&S clothing, shoes and food but have become increasingly frustrated with the lack of staff available in this 3 floor store. The last time I went there, I was buying some shoes an lingerie, lingerie was not a problem but I needed some help in the shoe section, not a single member of staff available on the whole floor to help, so I ended up buying just one pair as opposed to 2 that I wanted to purchase. When I then went to pay there was only one cashier behind the tills and 8 people ahead of me, the cashier kept ringing her bell for a good 15-20 minutes to call for more staff and no one came for over 20 minutes and then two people arrived at the same time and did not seem at all bothered when the other cashier said she'd been calling them for ages. At least 4 people who were behind me left the items they wanted to buy and walked out of the store, this is a sure fire way to lose business, this was around 6pm, people were saying they had just popped in for a quick shop after work and had trains to catch from Ealing Broadway. I never used to have any complaints with the level of service once I'd actually managed to get served but even that seems to have gone downhil of late, what a shame!
The quality of the items for sale can't be faulted whether it be clothing, shoes, lingerie, food, drinks, household items, gifts, etc, but the queues really need to move faster. The sales can be fantastic with some really good bargains too!
This level of service is not acceptable and I'm sad that this once fabulous store which I always felt had fanstastic customer service has sunk this low. I used to go to M&S at least twice a month and now I visit every other month only. And they wonder why business is down?!
Management really need to improve service levels or lose more customers. When you have half an hour for lunch, you really don't want to queue for 20 minutes to get a sandwich!

I think I'd call this a medium sized Marks and Spencer. The Ealing store has three floors, there's a decent sized food hall on the ground floor which includes a hot food counter. The womens' clothes collections include Per Una and Autograph, and there's a good lingerie section. The home department is small, mostly crockery and linen, there isn't space for furniture or technology. The kidswear and menswear departments are both reasonably sized. There's a rather dull coffee shop on the second floor, they need to get the decorators in and make that cafe more inviting.