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This is John Lewis , but not as you know it, with a £6.5m revamp of its high-profile branch on London’s Oxford Street signalling its belief that department stores have a future. After a hiatus when it sought to move away from retail and make money from other things, such as renting flats and selling home insurance , the John Lewis Partnership, which also owns Waitrose, confirmed plans to invest £800m in its namesake brand over the next four years.
A large chunk of the money is to be spent on revitalising its stores. Peter Ruis, the boss of the department store chain, said it had been honest about that fact it had not been investing enough in its stores. It planned to rectify that because it was now clear from a sales perspective that shops are “here to stay”, he said.
During the fight for survival in the pandemic, John Lewis explored turning entire floors of the Oxford Street store into offices . However, the pendulum appears to have swung the other way, and the £6.5m revamp on the country’s best-known shopping street will be used to test new ideas.
“We all came out of Covid thinking we had trained customers to shop online, and it turned out we hadn’t,” said Ruis. “There has been a philosophical reset across the whole industry as it realised customers have come rushing back to stores, with younger customers coming back the quickest.” As part .