Jayne Dowle: Retail gurus can get lost, just like us customers

And then, nine times out of 10, they will have run out of size 14 and definitely, yes definitely, they won’t have any more in the stockroom so there is no point them going to look.

When it comes to confusing the customer, M&S is by no means the only offender, but it is definitely one of the worst. I was in Asda the other day on a stealth raid that intended to make the US Navy Seals’ 20 minutes in the bin Laden compound look positively dilatory. I knew the exact position of my targets, all I had to do was lock and load the trolley. But some mysterious force had moved the pasta. Why move something as simple as pasta?

I finally found it, about six feet further up the aisle from the place it has been for the last five years. From now on, the prime spot at the end is obviously to be reserved for some yummy processed item the manager has been told to promote.

In retail school, there is probably a perfectly sensible explanation for moving pasta six feet up an aisle, but whatever it is, it is wrong.

Retail gurus apparently earn good money by telling retailers that getting customers lost and exhausted makes good business sense. That’s why escalators in department stores never go up and down opposite each other.

You always have to trudge past the rails of hideous cocktail dresses or posh dinnerware that you would never buy (or afford) in a million years just to get to the toilets. That’s great fun with a toddler crossing its legs, let me tell you.

It is simple to understand the logic; this kind of trickery makes us see things that we would otherwise ignore. And presumably, when we see these things, we will be so overcome with delight, we will shell out £5 for two punnets of strawberries, just because we fell upon them when we were looking for socks.

Considering the century or more of experience that M&S has at selling stuff, you might expect its bosses to be brave enough to tell these gurus where to stuff their shop-floor plan. But no, M&S has had a crisis of insecurity for years, which is why it can’t stop picking at itself, like a teenager who frets about her spots, her hair, her skirt length and her freckles.

And if you thought reshuffling was annoying now, wait til new M&S boss Marc Bolland gets his teeth into his £600m makeover and “cluster stores” which will target the goods available in each branch very closely to the local demographic.

I can’t wait to see what he makes of Barnsley. I wish I could find out the day he is coming, just so I could stalk him and see what he has to say about our “local demographic”.

If he thinks I’m stroppy, wait until he meets the old ladies who wander for hours round the food hall with their baskets looking for meringues or tins of stewing steak, trying to work out whether the fact that they aren’t where they last saw them is due to their age or something more sinister, perhaps to do with rationing in the new age of austerity. And it’s a brave woman, of any age, who deploys a trolley in our food hall.

What with the anxious old ladies, and the weary staff constantly pushing their carts of greengroceries back and forth from random destination to random destination, there isn’t room for anything with wheels, such as baby-buggies or mobility scooters.

Why can’t the retailers see that exasperated shoppers are never going to be happy shoppers? Can’t they understand that however many millions they throw at the latest store makeover or “cluster” experiment, if we can’t find what we’re looking for, we won’t come into the shop?

That’s why so many of us are preferring to shop online, where the only thing you can fall out with is your laptop when it crashes under the weight of your virtual “basket”. And if that laptop eventually dies of retail exhaustion, you can even order another one without having to endure the hell that is an electrical store.

There is hope. But it is Swedish. Ikea has its faults, but the one thing you can’t argue with is its signposting. Get on that yellow brick road and you will never get lost. You might find yourself at the till bearing a PVC bag full of inexplicable items with unpronounceable names, but at least you will have been able to find them.