Morrisons is shuttering around 100 of its company-owned Morrisons Daily stores, affecting hundreds of jobs.
The supermarket began consulting affected colleagues on the proposals today, The Grocer can reveal.
It plans to close all of the affected stores over the next few months. The supermarket will look to find roles for the impacted colleagues elsewhere within its supermarkets or manufacturing business “where possible”.
Convenience has been a major source of growth for Morrisons, and CEO Rami Baitiéh has set the aim of opening hundreds of Morrisons Daily stores over the next few years.
Morrisons insisted that it remained committed to and was on track with its convenience growth strategy, despite the closures.
The stores set to close represented “the most challenged” in its estate and were loss-making, it said. All are former McColl’s stores, acquired by Morrisons during the 2022 acquisition of the fascia.
Instead, Morrisons intends for the vast majority of the new openings to be franchise stores, The Grocer understands. It is also in the process of looking to sell off some of its company-owned (dubbed internally as COCO) stores to franchisees.
The closures are the latest major change to Morrisons’ convenience business in the space of three months. In February, convenience director Matt Heslop suddenly departed the supermarket after less than a year in the role.
Morrisons then announced a major restructure of its convenience buying team, which saw Morrisons Daily commercial and support functions merged with its supermarket buying team to form a single division under group trading director Andrew Staniland.
It effectively axes Morrisons daily trading team with the loss of around 100 jobs. Group retail director Martin Dawson now oversees Morrisons Daily Stores, which now sit as part of Morrisons’ retail division.
The c-store proposals mark the third major round of redundancies this year by Morrisons, after it announced in April it would cut headcount at its Hilmore House HQ by around 8% as it ramped up its use of AI across the business.
The economic fallout of the Iran war, has put further pressure on Baitiéh to cut costs in order to fuel his turnaround plan of the private equity-owned supermarket and pay down Morrisons’ £3.1bn debt pile. The supermarket says its debt has come down by 46% since the start of Baitiéh’s turnaround plan.
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