Former Marks & Spencer chairman and chief executive Sir Stuart Rose said this week that his old firm needs to grasp the nettle and begin delivering food to customer's doorsteps.
The online service they already have is very limited. It consists of cakes, cold meats and sandwiches - food for parties and picnics rather than your weekly shop.
Rose, it could be argued, should mind his own business having had the chance to take the food business online and failing to do so by the time he left in 2010. He's also the chairman of Ocado which is hawking round an instant solution to anyone with online food delivery ambitions - reportedly including Carrefour in France to Safeway in the US.
On the other hand he has a very good point (see The Hawker, Thursday, October 17).
In the old days it was perfectly acceptable to argue that Marks & Spencer's shoppers don't tend to do a full shop at the store - including, for example, nappies, washing powder and stocking up on staples like rice and pasta. They buy those from Sainsbury's or Waitrose.
So if customers aren't ordering every week and the shop is more for selectively buying into quality, for special occasions or just a lazy visit to the Simply Food store at the train station on the way home because you didn't make it to the supermarket that week, where does online ordering fit into buying habits?
What is more, when do we ever spend £80, £100 or even £150 these days on a trip to Marks & Spencer?
What's more the cost involved must be making management heads spin. Already struggling to make profits grow, the board must have weighed up the fact that, as analysts estimate, it costs about £15 to deliver each customer order from an online shop. Executives must have baulked at the numbers involved.
But Rose pointed out that by next year all the majors grocers will have some form of online service.
That includes Tesco (sales £44 billion), Sainsbury's (£25 billion), Asda (£23 billion) and Waitrose £5.3 billion) who have been selling food online for years; Iceland (£2.6 billion) which launched its service before summer and is busily rolling it out to all its 800 or so stores; the Co-Operative Group (£7.4 billion) which is testing a fledgling service ahead of Christmas - as is Morrisons who is running its operation through Ocado in a deal struck in May.
Waitrose, obviously, also supplies Ocado's main delivery business.
But is that any reason for Marks & Spencer to follow suit. All the reasons it states for not doing it seem valid enough.
Except for the obvious question - what does their customer want? Is it really more convenient to go trekking to stores come rain or shine on busy weekends when you've also got to mow the lawn, pick the kids up from piano lessons or football practice and visit granny?
And with shoppers being so promiscuous these days isn't it obvious that what their customer wants? (And their customer is most of us at some point or another every day, week or month). We have all come to expect - and, soon, take for granted - the convenience to access products when and how we want.
Whether that is delivery, click and collect or good old fashioned shopping - believe it or not most of us do still schlep to stores and unstack those shelves on a regular basis.
But the bar is getting higher. This weekend Tesco, leading the grocery Charge of the Light Brigade into online grocery shopping, said it planned to test out an option for shoppers to collect food at the school gates, at libraries or in car parks. Isn't the Tesco shopper, who also does a bit of shopping in M&S now and again, going to wonder at some point why Marks & Spencer's board doesn't do the same - and find it a little infuriating that it doesn't bother?
Is the food THAT good?
So, in a multichannel world where choice is key and the customer must be heard, doing nothing isn't really an option any more. Even if that option is an expensive and unpalatable one for the retailers involved.
When do valid reasons simply become excuses?
Marks & Spencer's food business may be standing up to scrutiny at the moment and on a high relative to many of its bigger supermarket rivals (the obvious and crucial exception being Waitrose which has outperformed M&S for years).
But, as Morrisons found to its cost, you cannot ignore this rapidly changing consumer environment. And when you do decide to play catch up with the others it can be a messy and, in the end, expensive business.
The online food channel is expected to double to £11 billion in five years. It is where all the action and growth can be found.
Even if it means having a limited selection, keeping it to London-only stores or getting a delivery boy to shuttle back and forth from Simply Food stores in London to busy homes late at night, isn't it worth a try?
Time, then, to do as the old man says. Grasp the nettle, Marks & Spencer, or find yourselves getting badly stung.
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