I'm so disappointed, I grew up shopping at M&S snd as young adult still bought most of my clothes there. However for at least 10 years they don't seem to have anything to offer me (I'm in my 40's) apart from food.
Their Sparks card is a bad joke, I've got over 57,000 points from regular food purchases but to obtain any benefits I'm expected to log in and pick deals I'm interested in. Who's got time to do that before they go and buy a sandwich? I know Boots ask you check offers too but they also generously accumulate money on your card with every purchase which you can use to buy products. Sparks offers nothing at all, they get all the valuable data but customers get nothing of any use.
I foolishly bought school uniform for my 3 kids because it was a 20% off deal. Instead of delivering it in one or two large boxes they posted it to me with most of the items in individual bags which took up loads of space, I received 16 parcels in total! Having tried on the uniform and finding it far too large for my normal size kids I decided to return it and was amazed to find that in order to return it to the local Collect store I was expected to tear off a printed piece of paper and attach it on to each individual parcel! All the other retailers that I shop online with have sticky labels which are so easy to attach.
I rang customer services and asked if they could collect the parcels so that I don't have to use sticky tape to attach 16 labels on and they refused and were particularly unhelpful.
There was still a part of me that felt some loyalty to them and I wanted to call head office to let them know how frustrating it is to shop with them now. Well I found it impossible to contact them, there was a number online which kept me on hold for 8 mins before I gave up.
Any loyalty or wishes for them to get their act together so that I could shop with them again evaporated. I feel so sorry for their shop floor staff who will continue to lose their jobs as stores close through no fault of their own. Incompetent management teams for at least the last decade continue to treat their customer like idiots. The only way to have any contact with M&S is though the call centre and those staff appear to have no way of escalating customer concerns, certainly I was given very short shrift. If the Senior managers really want to turn the business around they need to stop tinkering and actually connect with real customers and lots of them. They need to know why so few people are buying their products now and actually ask them why themselves, maybe call 10 customers each once per week picked at random from their Sparks database.
I'm not sure why I'm offering them suggestions, I just don't care any more which makes me sad.