Every superhero needs their origin story. And Stuart Machin is no different. Not only has the M&S boss performed a Superman-in-a-phone-booth transformation from the smiling everyman of a few years ago to the smouldering, sharp-bearded supermarket supremo we see today, he’s also never been shy about talking up the transformative effects of his first supermarket job.

“I was the kid with top marks for effort, but always middling (at best) in terms of grades. At 16, I was anxious – I didn’t know what I wanted to do or where I was going to go,” he wrote in a blog post earlier this year, going on to describe how his first job “pushing trolleys at SavaCentre…turned me into a more confident young man”.

He’s not the only fmcg bigwig who’s fond of talking up supermarkets’ role in social mobility and youth employment.

When Tesco launched its Stronger Starts apprenticeship system back in 2024, CEO Ken Murphy said: “It doesn’t matter who you are, where you live or what your background is, you can go from shopfloor to boardroom with determination, ambition and drive.”

It’s a narrative the industry loves to peddle, and whether that claim is overplayed or not, there’s no doubt that retail is a key industry in providing opportunities for young people to enter the world of work.

When the levy breaks

So it’s little surprise that, in recent years, the sector has been among the most vociferous critics of the Conservative government’s much-maligned Apprenticeship Levy. While researching the industry’s reaction to its replacement, the new Growth & Skills Levy, it was hard not to be overwhelmed by the sheer number of articles in The Grocer criticising the previous incarnation.

Machin himself called it “maddening”, but it’s also been described as “broken” and “a £3bn swindle”. From a lack of flexibility and the difficulty of drawing down funds paid into the levy to a supposed lack of transparency over what happened to unspent money, retailers were not happy at all.

While there are doubts over the veracity of that latter claim, there’s no doubt the Apprenticeship Levy was a failure. After all, since it was introduced in 2017, the number of apprenticeships has fallen by about a third from roughly 500,000 to 350,000.

However, industry bosses lambasting the levy appear to be conveniently overlooking their own part in the youth unemployment crisis. After all, Alan Milburn’s landmark review into young people and work, released at the end of May, pointed out some rather inconvenient truths for the sector.

The report said many retailers “now prefer to extend the hours of existing staff rather than take on new part-time workers who may need support and supervision”, adding that work which ”once offered a relatively straightforward way in” has become more demanding.

“Customer service roles now involve handling complex queries across multiple digital channels,” he wrote. “Warehouse jobs require speed, precision and compliance with tightly managed performance systems.”

Perhaps most damningly of all, Milburn states that “retail work has been reorganised so that fewer staff are expected to do more. The result is not simply fewer entry-level jobs, but more conditional access to them.”

The great retail restructure

Doing more with less. It’s an imperative that will have been uttered last week as Asda axed 150 head office jobs as part of its turnaround plan. True, these were not entry-level jobs for young people, but recent retail history shows that ‘blue collar’ roles are just as precarious.

Last August, for example, Morrisons cut 3,600 jobs as part of a mass store closure. Then in January, Tesco chopped nearly 400 jobs as part of a ‘bakery restructure’. The following month Ocado scrapped 1,000 jobs in a ‘cost-cutting restructure’. And in April Nestlé UK cut more than 450 jobs as part of its global turnaround plan, with trade union GMB warning that factories across the UK could be affected. This comes on top of the hundreds of jobs lost in recent years across the industry as supermarkets closed cafés, specialty counters and more.

As recently as February, the BRC warned that more retail job losses were looming after it found 61% of CFOs planned to reduce staffing hours or overtime, while 42% planned to reduce head count in stores. Finance chiefs planned to make up for the cuts by ‘driving higher productivity’ (68%) and investing in automation (61%).

“As noted in the Milburn review, there’s a danger that in their quest to find efficiencies, retail bosses are loading more tasks onto fewer workers. Not only is this likely to place a strain on existing employees, it undermines the supply of genuine entry-level jobs for young people trying to get their start in the world of work,” Billy Huband-Thompson, head of research & policy at the Sutton Trust, told The Grocer.

“Employers should look to create genuine entry-level opportunities for young people not just because it’s the ‘right thing to do’ but because it can help them widen their talent pool and access talent they might not otherwise. For their part, the government needs to focus on bringing the cost of employing young people down and double-down on its focus on young apprentices.”

Fmcg bosses can reasonably point to the huge array of employment schemes they offer to young people. They also have every right to criticise the disastrous Apprenticeship Levy and ask for more from its replacement. But while entry-level jobs continue being shed, they can’t just wash their hands of the “chronic problem” described by Milburn.

Now is the time for supermarkets and the wider sector to step up, too. That would be truly heroic.

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