Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

The great British shopper has kept our economy moving forward since the early 1990's.

But this autumn has seen a turning point. The high street boom is over.

The symbolic manifestation is today's dour trading statement for the 13 weeks to the end of December from the totemic market leader, Marks & Spencer.

Its chief executive, Stuart Rose, tells me that conditions in the clothing market are tougher than they’ve been for a decade – though he adds that there is a dual economy, with certain sectors like food faring better.

The most worrying numbers from Marks are those relating to general merchandise, or clothing and homeware.

In those areas, overall sales were down a fraction; and sales adjusting for new selling space, or like for like sales, were more than 3 per cent lower.

To achieve even that uninspiring performance, Marks had to charge 6 per cent less than in the previous year.

The savage deflation worked, in that shoppers bought more items. But the aggregate value of those items fell.

Marks and its rivals may well have to cut prices by even more this year, to prevent turnover from falling off a cliff - which should, at least, lessen the inflation anxieties at the Bank of England.

The picture in food was better - though Marks's food-sale stats will look worse than those of Tesco and Sainsbury (possibly because it doesn’t own petrol forecourts and can’t woo custom by offering cheap petrol).

Does it all mean that Marks' remarkable recovery under Stuart Rose has stalled?

Will he join the ignominious roll-call of his immediate predecessors who tried and failed to restore the business to its post-War glory?

Well Marks’s share price has taken a battering in the past few weeks - and its market value is no longer spectacularly greater than what Philip Green said he would pay for the company in 2004 (though that’s to ignore a substantial share buyback).

But it would be premature to argue that M&S’s board may yet be shown to have been misguided when rebuffing Green.

Here are reasons why Rose and Marks probably deserve the benefit of the doubt.

1) The previous reversals at Marks over the past decade came when many of its competitors were doing well and the overall market wasn't in bad shape. This time, retail sales in general are flat and much of the competition is also in a mess.

2) Marks hasn't yet resorted to the kind of savage price-discounting we are seeing from its rivals. So it has ammunition in reserve.

3) It has the strongest balance sheet and best property portfolio on the high street. It is therefore better fortified than most for any worsening in the economic climate.

4) Marks has not yet had to sacrifice substantial profit margin. Its pre-tax profits for the year as a whole should still rise to something just over a billion pounds – though analysts will today reduce their profit forecasts by a few percent.

However, all that is simply to say that Marks may emerge as the best of a battered bunch. For most retailers in 2008, growth in sales, profits and cash-flow will be desperately elusive.

UPDATE 08:30AM: There has been a bloodbath of retailing shares this morning: M&S down 17 per cent (yikes), Debenhams down 10 per cent, Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Retail (Argos) 7 per cent lower, Burberry down 5 per cent, Kingfisher down 5 per cent, Kesa down 5 per cent, French Connection down 7 per cent, Smiths down 4 per cent, DSG down 4 per cent (they were already mullered in the previous few days), Next down 8 per cent (ditto), even Tesco down 3 per cent.

UPDATE 9:50AM: The Marks & Spencer share price is now 409p, just a hair’s breadth from the 400p per share which Green said he would pay for the company in the summer of 2004. It’s a fair comparison, because the subsequent buyback of shares by M&S was at less than 400p. This is potentially pretty embarrassing for Rose and the M&S board, given the colossal sums they’ve spent on modernising the stores and advertising.