I AM not surprised M&S are closing 57 of its larger stores across the country.

I don’t know who does their clothes marketing but for years I’ve been saying that they have the market all wrong.

For the best part of 50 years I have been going into M&S stores when food and clothes were all under the same roof and in all that time until recently when some food halls have been housed separately.

The women's clothes section has always been pretty bad, especially in the sizing part. They still seem to think most customers are sizes 10 -14 and aged 18- 45.

Wrong, the majority of M&S customers are in the most part sizes 16-24 and aged 35-70.

I have been in these stores hundreds of times over those years looking for sizes varying from 20-24 and when I have asked an assistant why I cannot find anything in those sizes the answer has always been that they have sold out.

In the meantime there was dozens and dozens of rails with sizes 10-14 clothes unsold.

You would think they would have got the message over the years, first that young people mostly don’t shop in M&S and secondly if they constantly are running out of the bigger sizes, surely they should be selling a lot more of them and a lot less of the smaller sizes.

One newspaper stated the average size of women nowadays is a size 16+.

I rest my case.

Ann Cruickshank,

Oxford Road,

Andsell,

Lytham St Anne’s