With sales down and boardrooms in crisis, these are troubling times for the tradional big names on the high street. Paul Willis reports.

IT has been a long and painful year for Marks & Spencer. The grand old man of the high street fought off a highly public takeover bid from Bhs boss Philip Green earlier in the year amid falling sales and boardroom strife.

M&S' annus horribilus was compounded by the news just a few weeks ago that it had been overtaken by supermarket chain Asda as Britain's biggest clothing retailer.

The store's high-profile problems are replicated throughout the high street, as famous old names such as Boots and WH Smith seemingly lurch from one crisis to another.

Earlier this year, electrical retailer Dixons took the decision to axe a third of its high street stores.

Bookseller WH Smith is grappling with falling sales and a multi-million pound pension fund black hole amid promises of going back to basics.

Even the weather seems to be conspiring against the high street brands as an August washout kept the customers away, leading to an unexpected drop in consumer inflation announced last week.

But - bad weather aside - conventional wisdom is clear on the main cause of this high street strife: the growth of the big supermarkets.

Tesco and Asda, which is owned by US company Wal-mart, are singled out for luring customers away from the high street with their expansive plans to branch out into non-food sales in recent years.

The evidence is certainly compelling. Tesco now sells more toiletries and medicine than Boots and Superdrug combined and more chart CDs than Woolworths and Virgin.

Asda's in-house clothing brand, George, now has five standalone stores; the latest opened in Liverpool at the end of last month. While careful not to declare out-and-out war, the high street big guns are at least acknowledging the threat posed by the supermarkets.

Nick Bubb, a retail analyst with Evolution Group, said: "It is no coincidence that all of the big name retailers have changed their management teams within the past two years. It is obvious they are all getting nervous about performance and, of course, if you look at the market place, you see that they have good reason to be."

Boots chief executive Richard Baker, who was recruited from Asda to bring some inside knowledge of how to fight back, said recently: "You don't have to be a genius to realise that the competition in this market is extraordinary and intensifying all the time."

Terry Robinson, lecturer in marketing at Teesside University, who specialises in retailing, said the big supermarkets were simply out-buying the traditional high street names.

"The issue at the centre of this is power, and particularly buying power," he said.

"The supermarkets have it in abundance. Asda is owned by Wal-mart, far and away the biggest retailer in the world. Wal-mart's speciality is non-food sales, so although Asda may be breathing down the neck of high street retailers now, that trend is set to grow."

Boots is the high street brand with perhaps the most to fear from the looming presence of the US supermarket chain. With the buying power to court multinational pharmaceutical firms, Wal-mart could potentially fill out its Asda stores with a range of medical products more wide-ranging and affordable than Boots the Chemist. Make no mistake about it, the competition is going to get tougher and the likes of Boots and WHSmith are going to have to work harder just to stand still," said Mr Robinson.

But while the famous old names seem to be suffering, other high street stores have been unaffected by the apparently unstoppable rise of the supermarkets.

Clothing brands Next and French Connection both announced rises in profits last week despite the current retail slump. How have they managed to stay ahead of the game?

The consensus among retail analysts is that there will always be room for well-run specialist stores.

Mr Robinson said that increasingly the high street is used by consumers to buy specialist goods, while everyday goods are moving out of town.

"If you are looking to buy a specialist item like a wedding dress, you will go to a big commercial centre," he said.

"But if you are just after some socks, the trend more and more is to go to out-of-town retail parks.

"Look at the towns that have suffered from retail blight. The places where stores are closing on the high street tend to be medium-sized towns like Middlesbrough, not big commercial centres like Leeds or Newcastle, because they can't offer the same variety as the big cities and can't compete on price with the retail parks."

So is the future really so bleak for M&S et al? Despite their obvious problems, the famous old retailer is still posting a profit and the plans are already under way for a fight back.

Chief executive Stuart Rose has ordered a review of all aspects of the business, which led to whisperings last month that the store was ready to ditch its famous easy refunds policy in a bid to save cash.

But Mr Robinson said the solution was more complex than simple cost-cutting.

"Marks & Spencer is an institution. It has a very rigid structure and hierarchy, which mean it is often slow in reacting to change.

"In many ways, these facts mean it is totally unsuited to the fashion industry, which is notoriously fast-moving.

"What M&S really needs to do is to get back to its core values of high quality service and providing quality reliable clothes. It's not very glamorous, but there it is."