Courtesy costs nothing but it often reaps rich rewards. That’s just good business

She has even been on a secret shopping spree to an incredulous Creaseys in Guernsey.

Let’s face it, in our hi-tech, quick-sale marketplace the one thing high street retailers can offer over the electronic order book is face-to-face service. It’s what they call in the trade the USP – the unique selling point.

Neglect it at your peril. In my experience, to be told by a sheepish sales assistant in an Oxford Street store two weeks ago ‘I’m new here. I don’t know where things are’ amounts to an insulting indictment of lean-margin profiteering.

It’s not unreasonable to suppose that the flight from the high streets to the online shopping keyboards has come about for a cocktail of reasons. Increased familiarity with IT and a preference for scanning options in anonymous privacy, along with economies in the walking department, are just as likely to have influenced shoppers’ decisions as a fear of negotiating unhelpful or unskilled sales staff.

Mind you, they do take a risk. We all know what happens to online orders when the weather hits the supply lines.

In one of her TV programmes, the campaigning Ms Portas chose to take garment retailers to task after filming undercover evidence of long queues for the tills or changing rooms, uninterested and even insolent staff and poorly managed establishments. She then chose to contrast them with the the fast-food industry, where the server-client interface is direct, personal and positive.

Her comparison was vivid, though I expect it was always going to be – the sort of self-fulfilling conceit we are used to in reality TV these days. And since she chose to deploy the same staff in both situations, it appeared all the more convincing.

Lest the clothing industry starts hanging its head too low, allow me to add my own totally unscientific experience.

It may just have been a one-off, but I can report that the morning after watching her programme, I experienced precisely the opposite. In a clothing outlet in Halkett Place, despite it being very busy with end-of-sale custom, I was met with welcoming and active assistance to locate items, while at lunchtime barely a street away, I emerged unfed from a generally popular bar/restaurant, having been ignored long enough for it to matter by a preoccupied skeleton staff oblivious to new arrivals and in no mood to display any professional hunger for the cash I was preparing to spend there.

It is tempting to reflect rosily on the culture of camaraderie and individual attention once offered by traditional newsagents and post offices, though these days it can easily appear intrusive for those of us on the move, wrapped up in our own private concerns.

My wife, who is French, will always trill ‘Hello’ when she walks into any small establishment. I confess I used to think it pretty quaint till I began visiting France on a regular basis and discovered that it is still the norm.

Whether or not you actually receive better service, at least the atmosphere is immediately positive.

However, back on local soil, nothing could surpass the selfless civility I encountered from an out-of-town electrical retailer last week, who though he didn’t think he could repair my spin-dryer, reckoned he knew another outlet that probably could and promptly got out the telephone book and made the call with appropriate technical explanation.

In my view, to receive exemplary service in an establishment where you are not known is a definite extra plus.

When it comes to the point of sale, there is obviously a balance to be struck between the chance to examine goods in the flesh, having them explained by motivated and knowledgeable staff, and the wide choice, cheaper, promptly delivered items from an online catalogue.

But there is another important ingredient. Customers must obey the rules, too. We are well aware of the apocryphal stories of sales assistants incapable of breaking off from private conversations with colleagues to attend to would-be purchasers, but staff will counter with tales of rude, demanding and condescending customers, even those who deliver the extreme insult – their clamped preoccupation with the mobile phone. Service does not mean servility.

Treat the place as a tip and the staff as lackeys, and you get what you deserve. The sight of piles of discarded clothing heaped on tables and dropped on the floor in West End stores recently left me wondering just how little we value both goods and service.

We all know high-street retailers have had a hard time, and we can feel particular sympathy for those local establishments who suffer from the extra iniquities of a zero-ten tax regime. But the solution is in their hands.

There are three elements to the commercial success in the high street as much as the corner shop: good value, friendly, well-trained sales staff motivated by caring management; and customers who feel motivated to shop there. Of course, money supply and profit underpin the whole enterprise, but get the first three right and you’ve gained a priceless advantage over your competitors.

There is nothing better than honest service with a smile – and I’m not talking about transparently obsequious pretence. Courtesy costs nothing but reaps rich rewards. That’s just good business.