With tens of thousands of jobs under imminent threat on the high street, in pubs, restaurants, hotels and the travel industries as a result of stay-at-home Britain, the boom in doorstep grocery deliveries means Tesco is to create 16,000 permanent jobs (The Times £).
The roles include 10,000 pickers, who select and pack grocery orders for home delivery, and 3,000 drivers, as well as a variety of other roles in stores and distribution centres (The Guardian).
Tesco said it expects the majority of these roles to be filled by staff who have joined the company on a temporary basis in recent months (The Mail).
The thousands of new roles are in addition to 4,000 permanent jobs added since the start of the coronavirus crisis (The Telegraph).
Tesco said online sales now accounted for 16% of its total, up from 9% before the pandemic, and that almost 1.5 million people a week were buying groceries through its website, compared with 600,000 at the start of the crisis. It expects sales over the internet to jump two-thirds this year to £5.5bn (The Financial Times £).
The Telegraph analyses why Tesco joined the online grocers gold rush.
Big supermarkets are back in fashion, and not just with shoppers. Investors have been bidding up prices on large UK supermarket sites as shopping habits led by Covid-19 improve their profitability. More than £1bn of transactions involving such stores have completed so far this year, according to Colliers, the real estate group (The Financial Times £).
Multiple casual dining companies in the UK, including Yo! and PizzaExpress, are on the hook for rent at sites they no longer occupy after passing on leases to operators that have since gone bust, leaving them with extra bills at a time when few can afford to pay their own (The Financial Times £).
Nut prices have fallen to multiyear lows as fears over the pandemic and lockdown measures crunch big buyers such as airlines, hotels and pubs, creating a supply glut that has left sellers in limbo (The Financial Times £).
John Lewis is opening its Christmas shop earlier than ever after it found that searches for festive products had nearly quadrupled compared with last year (The Guardian).
KFC has admitted its famous Finger Lickin’ Good slogan is not quite right for the era of face masks and official hand-washing advice, as it launches a new advertising campaign with a change of focus (The Guardian).
JD Wetherspoon expects to suffer an annual loss and is bracing for a slide in sales once the chancellor’s Eat Out to Help Out scheme ends (The Times £).
Despite including the boost from the discount scheme, the trading figures published on Monday were lower than Wetherspoons had forecast when it raised £141m through a discounted equity placing in April (The Financial Times £).
The pub chain told investors that equivalent bar and food sales in the 44 days to August 16 were 16.9 per cent lower than in the same period last year. The slump came despite the opening of 844 of its 873 pubs following their closure in March as the virus lockdown was imposed (The Mail).
Retail parks are closest to getting back to their old customer numbers, but high streets are still struggling (The Telegraph).
Pregnant women should be told there is no safe amount of caffeine to consume, according to a new study that calls for a significant revision of guidelines (The Times £).
Large companies will face substantial fines if they cannot prove their supply chains are not linked to illegal deforestation under a proposed UK government crackdown (The Financial Times £).
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