Andy Murray may have faltered in the Wimbledon semi-finals, but today he can take his place alongside Diana, Princess of Wales, and the England football team as a Great Shopkeeping Excuse.

All have been blamed by shopowners keen to emphasise that falling sales are beyond their control. Trade at John Lewis last week was hit by Murray’s run at the All England Club, which kept the nation glued to their television sets and away from the shops, Britain’s biggest department store group said.

John Lewis, which is considered a barometer for conditions in the high street because of the breadth of its stock, said that “Andy Murray’s progress at Wimbledon” was among the distractions that kept punters out of shops. In the week that Murray defeated Stan Wawrinka in a five-set epic, then cruised past Juan Carlos Ferrero before falling to Andy Roddick, the home department of John Lewis saw sales fall by 10 per cent. Britain’s biggest department store group is not alone in finding a correlation between outside events and sales on the shopfloor.

It is almost traditional for retailers to blame falling profits on the weather or the housing market — anything, in short, but their stores or products. Most analysts agree that the master of the art is outdoor specialist Blacks Leisure, which also owns Millets. Climate change, the World Cup, a mild winter, a bad summer, a good summer and the cancellation of the Glastonbury Festival have all conspired to dampen trade at Blacks in recent years. One summer the headlines read: “Waterproofs keep profits going at Blacks.” The next, they stated: “Summer washout leaves struggling Blacks so blue.” Oddly, few of its recent chief executives have mentioned cut-price supermarket competition as a problem.

Similarly, even as Woolworths was well advanced on its march to insolvency, one of its chief executives blamed dodgy DVDs for a fall in sales. In 2005 Trevor Bish-Jones, the chain’s chief executive at the time, looked at a damaging plunge in the sales of blockbuster films and declared: “I think what’s happened is piracy.”

The Princess of Wales's death was also blamed for a nationwide dip in spending. On the day of her funeral, in 1997, Next said sales were down £3 million while one economist said that the impact on consumer confidence might have been severe enough to force the Bank of England to cut interest rates. It wasn’t.

The England football team’s failure to qualify for the 2008 European Championships had an even greater impact on British business. Analysts said the economic impact of the England manager Steve McClaren’s poor performance in the qualifiers would run into hundreds of millions of pounds as sales of everything from beer to televisions failed to receive an anticipated boost.

Mladen Petric’s late winner for Croatia against England in November 2007, which ended the side’s hopes of qualification, wiped £100 million off the market value of Sports Direct, Britain’s biggest sportswear retailer, and sparked a profit warning from Umbro, the maker of the England shirt.

It should be noted, however, that Blacks Leisure had previously complained that England involvement in a major tournament hit tent sales, as fathers refused to be prised away from the television to go camping.

Similarly, although the inexorably poor British summer is usually cast as the unexpected snag keeping retailers from greatness, the likes of Thorntons, the chocolatiers, and Greggs, the bakers, say they do better in cooler weather. As tangential as many excuses sound, the City takes most of them seriously, according to David Stoddart, a retail analyst at Altium, an investment bank. “Silly as they are, there is more than a grain of truth in them,” he said.

The last World Cup cost Moss Bros millions of pounds in sales because young men were not shopping, he added. “Those impulse purchases disappear.”

Yet many explanations sound eerily familiar. Last summer, John Lewis blamed poor trading on the Olympic Games.

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