Brief Historical Description and an Overview of the Organization's and the BU's Main Services

Brief Historical Description and an Overview of the Organization's and the BU's Main Services

Introduction

Marks & Spencer has been known as a famous UK retailing company and for that reason they are paradigms of best practice in the culture and society. Marks & Spencer in the western world is an administrative and management giant. It has been acknowledged as one of the best managed organizations all over Europe. The corporate objectives of Marks & Spencer are mentioned in its Mission statement which says that making an inspirational quality reachable to each and every commodity and this is the foundation which enlightens us what the business is all about and what it ought to be in the future. Marks & Spencer, in its mission statement talked about food and clothing business as its main business though financial objectives like wealth maximization of the shareholder is also considered since this aids in taking up more market share and as a result increased its sales.

Discussion

Background and Overview

After the Industrial Revolution, low-entry-point retailers on both sides of the Atlantic chose similar discount formats. In the United Kingdom, Marks and Spencer began life with Russian émigré Michael Marks's Penny Bazaar and his slogan, “Don't ask the price, it's a penny.” Marks was offering easy, comfortable shopping to a mass market: some illiterate and innumerate. U.K. market traders who, like charity/thrift shops, are rivals to discounters now offer a fixed-price scoop of produce, inviting the same low-engagement customer relationship.

The process of labor-market change has important implications for how workers are able to sell their labor in the labor market. First, employers may seek out labor markets in low-waged regions. A good example of this is textiles production. Historically, the United Kingdom and the New England region of the United States were the center of textiles manufacturing. As recently as 2001, Marks and Spencer, a large high-street retailer in the United Kingdom, purchased all its clothing from producers in the United Kingdom. However, due to competition from other retailers who sourced their goods from producers in Asia and could offer similar products at a lower price, Marks and Spencer among others subsequently dropped U.K. suppliers in favor of offshore producers. Between 1988 and 2001, the United Kingdom lost over 40 percent of its textile jobs. Second, those producers remaining in what are locally considered declining industries often restructure their employment by changing the way work is done through the introduction of new technologies or by seeking out a workforce that is socially distinct from that traditionally associated with the industry. For example, shifting employment from a largely white, native workforce to a largely immigrant workforce (as was the case in textiles production in the United Kingdom) or changing the gender of the employment by altering the conditions of work (e.g., by offering mother's hours rather than overtime). The result of this restructuring is often a decline in the number of workers, as is often the case ...