My wife and I visited the Kingston store yesterday, Wednesday 9th Jan to purchase a television. Their were a number of sales persons on the shop floor in the relevant department and having selected our chosen product were directed to the sales desk. This is where we were met by a significant queue due to there being only one person dealing with the actual sales made by the many shop floor assistants, on enquiring we were advised by who we understood to be a manager that the queue would take 15/20 mins to our being dealt with. We enquired that could they not place further staff on the tills to speed things up and were advised they had no one available, this is between 11 and 11:30am. We were further told that they were busy due to sales for which we replied this should not be unexpected and the store should staff the points of store congestion appropriately so as to afford shoppers a pleasant experience. The upshot was we got feed up with waiting and took our custom to another store where the service we received was that which we in the past had experience at John Lewis. We have shopped at John Lewis stores for 50 plus years this and other recent experiences leave us very disappointed. We also mention that whilst we were in discussion with management on the shop floor a further three customers advised the manager they had become exasperated with waiting and were taking their custom elsewhere. We would ask you to pass this e-mail onto the television buying department at Victoria as we understand they need information like this to inform them why sales do not match expectations. Regard