John Lewis, Britain's biggest department store chain, has blamed extremely warm weather for a decline in trade at its stores.

Extremely hot weather and a 9% drop within the home department brought the sales at retailer John Lewis down by 2.9% last week.

Electricals & home technology suffered a decline of 2.3% however things pertaining to fashion recorded an increase of 3.7%.

This confirms the tendency of department stores to perform lowly in hot weather. At the very start of the week hot weather hit sales but John Lewis recorded good trade on Saturday when the weather in most of the UK was appalling.

On the other hand, the hot weather boosted Waitrose, the company's supermarkets, which recorded total rise in sales by 9.8 per cent, somewhat down on the 10.5 per cent growth recorded in the week ending May 30.

The operational director of John Lewis, Andrew Murphy, said, "Although the hot weather at the start of the week meant we missed last year's score by 2.9 per cent, this represents an improvement on our strike rate for the year to date."

Though, online sales at johnlewis. com continued to grow at 7 % in total, John Lewis's sales recorded a decline of 5.3 % in trade so far this year.