M&S on Lordship Lane

[bil]

LondonMix Wrote:

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> Charlton has a Waitrose and M&S. It doesn't make

> you push nor does a lack of one make you shabby.

>

>

> Louisa Wrote:

> --------------------------------------------------

> -----

> > Jeremy Wrote:

> >

> --------------------------------------------------

>

> > -----

> > > I've no problem with charity shops. And as it

> > goes

> > > I think Beckenham is perfectly OK. But posh

> > ???!!

> >

> >

> > Jeremy, I know it pains the ED hoi polloi to

> have

> > to admit that Beckenham has had a Waitrose and

> M&S

> > for years, many many of them. Along with a

> > sainsburys and a lidl, a Foxtons, Nandos.. I

> could

> > go on. It's attracted wealthy people for

> decades.

> > Some neighbourhoods want to have it, some had

> it

> > and lost it, others have always had it aka

> > Beckenham.

> >

> > Louisa.

Agreed, Croydon centre has had both M&S and waitrose for years. They also have a LIDL and markets offering cheaper food. (also a virgin active and The Gym). You can buy or do nearly anything in Croydon at varying price ranges to suit all.

[Michael Palaeologus]

I went in for the first time this afternoon. It was as I expected, like every other M&S Simply Food I have ever been in. Made a few purchases to show willing.

Ref shelves - seemed OK to me, would have had a bumper opening weekend and stocks were low. Now, we can either have regular delivery lorry arrivals and full shelves or less regular delivery lorry arrival and so, un-stocked shelves.

The good people of East Dulwich were looking very much like East Berliners immediately after the fall of the Wall. Open mouthed in amazement at the riches of capitalism, pasty faced, home bleached hair and jeans. A few, no doubt will hold on to Ice-stalgia "I miss the frozen triple roasts and Greggs sausage rolls", but progress cannot be stopped and vitamins will enter the diet, like it or no.

[LondonMix]

Its a Food Hall not a Simply Foods :)

[Louisa]

Wouldn't say it was up to scratch with other M&S food stores I've been to. Far from it in fact. Relatively small range to begin with, worsened by a lack of stock. Staff who overall don't seem to be on the ball or able to answer questions. All coming across a little stretched and out of its depth. To add to this, the typical clientele who like to block the whole aisle with kids/extended family/friends/prams (delete as appropriate), shopping like no one else around them exists. Bit of a shambles overall after a few visits although some staff do seem to be very friendly and I did enjoy my wine selection Sunday. I'm with foxy, I wonder how long this will last.

Louisa.

[camberwell70]

BrandNewGuy Wrote:

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> Went in after 10 o'clock last night and scooped up

> lots of marked-down goodies. Might do that

> regularly...

Were these items crushed and devalued?

[Alan Medic]

Is this a shop you're talking about or the second coming or third? I may have missed one.

[peckham_ryu]

9.20 pm: no sushi left :-(

Consoled myself with a marked down Balanced For You chicken tikka masala. Still, if everyone could stop scoffing all the sushi before I finish at the gym, that would be ideal.

[monica]

What a shame, ED has wanted an M&S for years, we get one and all you do is complain, you guys are never happy. Its suitable for the area, they stock up every morning and during the day, I am assuming they are going to address the stock issues once they have a better idea of footfall.let them get on with it and please a lit bit more positivity in the mean time.

[TheCat]

monica Wrote:

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> What a shame, ED has wanted an M&S for years, we

> get one and all you do is complain, you guys are

> never happy. Its suitable for the area, they stock

> up every morning and during the day, I am assuming

> they are going to address the stock issues once

> they have a better idea of footfall.let them get

> on with it and please a lit bit more positivity in

> the mean time.

An M&S has opened? Oh what a marvelous surprise for us all. Where is it?

Its amazing how I haven't heard every little thing about it. I mean surely there would be 9 or 10 pages of largely banal chat about it by now? But no....I will have to check it out once I find out where it is.

[monica]

Thecat there is endless pages of nonsense chat, mainly re the planning for the last 7 years and now the opening will carry on the nonsense chat for another 7 years.

M and S is on the site of the old Iceland's store. Lovely store, great addition.

[edcam]

Poor Monica.....

[DulwichFox]

Have not been to the new M&S yet .. and I am still here.. I have not starved to death.. I have not become ill.

I am surviving without it..

Ok... It's only been a week, but I'm going to have a M&S 'Dry' September.

Foxy..

[monica]

edcam Wrote:

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> Poor Monica.....

????? No not poor the last time I looked, thanks very much :) Smiley face just in case you don't know what that is:)))))

[Earl Aelfheah]

It's a new shop. It sells food.

[*Bob*]

I bought a chocolate chip cookie in there yesterday.

Patrick McGoohan and Rock Hudson were fighting over a microfilm in aisle three and penguins were blocking most of the bakery section.

I'm going in for cheese tasters today - but I'll definitely be taking a coat.

[kbabes]

My wife just popped in for some eggs and pastries.. she came home around 15 minutes ago with six eggs and four pastries (x2 chocolate twists and x2 croissants). The croissants incidentally were straight? Anyone else had this problem?

[Jeremy]

As problems go, straight croissants is not a major one!

BTW Boulangerie Jade do very decent croissants (although I'm sure M&S is much cheaper)

[kbabes]

Jeremy Wrote:

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> As problems go, straight croissants is not a major

> one!

>

> BTW Boulangerie Jade do very decent croissants

> (although I'm sure M&S is much cheaper)

are they straight?

[Earl Aelfheah]

#Croissantgate

[kbabes]

just found this article... hope this clears it up.

International breakfast circles were roiled, as the Times might write, by the news last week that Tesco, the British supermarket chain, had decided to stop selling croissants that are shaped like croissants. Actually, the company announced that it would no longer be selling ?curved croissants,? but, given that ?croissant? means crescent, this wording was, to the linguistically alert, a bit self-cancelling: if it isn?t curved, it isn?t a croissant at all. In fairness, the word in English has migrated to mean not ?crescent-shaped flaky breakfast bread? but ?flaky breakfast bread,? a change that has also produced the New York practice that has bakery clerks calling a ?pain au chocolat??a cylinder of bread with chocolate inside?a ?chocolate croissant,? even as they point to something that is not remotely shaped like a croissant but looks instead exactly like a pain au chocolat. I find this aggravating, and tend to say so, even if it puts me in the same boat as my younger, Italophile brother, who announces his annoyance when he is offered a ?biscotti? when what he is getting is in fact a singular ?biscotto.? (Yes, ours is a peculiar family, of parochial irritations.)

The reason that Tesco provides for its decision is in itself striking: the boss of the company, one Harry Jones, announced that it is the ?spreadability? factor that has killed the kink, insisting that ?the majority of shoppers find it easier to spread jam, or their preferred filling, on a straighter shape with a single sweeping motion.? I have turned these words over and over in my mind, like a pastille in the mouth, and have yet to find any meaning in them at all. How hard can it be for the Brits, even in these decadent post-imperial days, to use a spreading knife and, with a mere twist of the wrist, spread jam in a ?single sweeping motion?? One can?t help but suspect?without evidence, but such is the nature of suspicion?that something to do with the added energy necessary to build a machine that squeezes out curved, as opposed to straight, croissant dough is behind Tesco?s decision.

Why is a croissant shaped that way, anyway? The first truth is that they are not, necessarily. As veteran visitors to Parisian bakeries know, the superior, all-butter croissants are already commonly articulated as straight pastries?or, at least, as gently sloping ones?while the inferior oil or margarine ones must, by law, be neatly turned in. This sometimes leads those who expect clarity and logic, rather than complexity and self-cancelling entrapment, from French laws to think that the straight croissants are all butter and the curved ones are reliably not. The truth is that a butter croissant can be any shape it chooses, on the general atavistic aristocratic principle that, butter being better, it creates its own realm of privilege.

One only wishes that Umberto Eco, whom we sadly lost last week, was still around to parse this issue, because Eco, long before he was king of the airport bookstore, was an emperor of signs, one of the world?s leading linguists and semioticians. The underlying logic for the croissant being a crescent, one suspects he would have said, is ?Saussurean,? after the great early-twentieth-century linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who glimpsed the truth that linguistic signs are arbitrary and find their meaning only by being clearly distinguished from other opposing signs. We know ?Monday? only because it doesn?t sound or look like ?Sunday.? P. G. Wodehouse, not surprisingly, showed his grasp of this rule when he had one of the Drones, on holiday in France, point out that he had been given a Continental breakfast consisting of ?a roll shaped like a crescent and a roll shaped like a roll.? Without the standard accompanying brioche, there would be no need for the curve; a roll-shaped roll produces a curved one, as ?Sunday? makes ?Monday.? The croissant, in this view, is curved in order to make plain what it isn?t as much as what it is.

Murkier depths of meaning surely reside here, too, which would have taken Eco?s eye to plumb. Doubtless some social historian, a century or so hence, will get a thesis out of examining how, on the very verge of the threatened ?Brexit??the exit of England, at least, from the European Community?the mass marketers of Britain ostentatiously rejected a form seen as so clearly French that it is a regular part of that ominously named ?Continental? breakfast. Adding an arbitrary national shape to an established one to attempt an entirely English croissant, that future scholar will argue, is an affirmation of refusing to be one with Europe. (The crescent, moreover, is the sign of the Islamic empire, and some damp, suspicious kinds will see meaning in that, too.)

On the other side of the Channel, the readiness of the Brits to drop the crescent shape is bound to be depressing?particularly as it arrives at the very moment when another lovely French bit of curvilinear detailing, the circumflex, is coming under assault as well. The circumflex is the little conical hat that many French words wear to indicate a sounded accent, but it will now be lost, or at least optional, on words like co?t. According to the latest round of diktat from the Acad?mie Fran?aise?or, actually, from a diktat some twenty-plus years old, but only now coming into force?the circumflex, which is indeed an impediment to obviousness in spelling, can be put away in the cupboard of needless old embroidery.

The era of the straightened-out croissant seems upon us; already this morning at Pret a Manger, the pastries look suspiciously closer to the pure vertical line. One need not be a helpless nostalgist to feel that unkinking the croissant, and decapitating the circumflex, comes at a cost, or co?t. Taking the curve from the croissant, like taking the circumflex out of circulation, is a way of unbending the world, reducing the store of superfluous civilization that is essential to its sanity, and to our continuity. Let us not unbend our breakfast, or oversimplify our spelling too eagerly, or too soon. Such levellings, however efficient they may seem, in the end merely flatten our minds.

[peckham_ryu]

tl;dr: croissants are losing their curve across Britain, a cognoscento foretells the dumbing down of our nation.

[Penguin68]

Oh, come on - straight croissants are easier to pack (you get more in to a carton or display area) - this is all about supermarket 'efficiency' and cost saving, and nothing to do with customer preference. (Actually, you get more into the oven as well, so additional efficiency opportunities). I have never seen anyone (other than a child showing off) eat a croissant from one end to the other, breaking it up and dealing with each piece is always the preference I have noticed. And many people eat a plain (butter) croissant with coffee and don't add additional butter and jam.

[KidKruger]

I eat mine from one end to the other.

If it was the size of (say) a car, I'd consider breaking the croissant up, but as it's just the size of a croissant there's no need - and it's not heavy so there'd be no weight/effort saving advantage.

I think the kids have this one right.

[Zebedee Tring]

Straight croissants? Undoubtedly a first world problem.

In any case nowhere as nourishing as an Iceland Deep Pan Double Cheeseburger Pizza - a bargain for only ?1.00.

[Seabag]

Straight croissant , whatever next?