Tesco staff in Flintshire face uncertain future as supermarket giant says 9000 jobs will be affected in restructure

Tesco has announced that up to 9,000 jobs will be affected in a restructuring plan of its stores and head office.

The supermarket chain which has stores in Broughton, Mold and Holywell said it has briefed staff today on changes to “simplify” the business and ultimately reduce costs.

Tesco says customers are using its counters less frequently and expects 90 stores will close their meat, fish and deli counters, with the remaining 700 trading with either a full or flexible counter offer for our customers.

It is also changing the way it manages stock instore which will mean “a significantly reduced workload” with fewer hours needed to complete routines.

Less hours will be spent on in-store merchandising a statement says: “We’ve been working to reduce the amount of layout changes we make, so it’s easier for customers, and less work for colleagues meaning fewer merchandising hours are needed.”

Staff canteens are to be replaced with self-serve kitchens – “this change will impact the people working in our colleague rooms, who are employed by third-party caterers, and we are working with them to provide as much support as we can.”

The statement goes onto say that “contrary to media reports over the weekend, we do not plan to make any significant changes to bakeries this year.”

“Overall, we estimate that up to 9,000 Tesco colleague roles could be impacted, however, our expectation is that up to half of these colleagues could be redeployed to other customer-facing roles. We are working with our third party providers to understand the impact on their staff in our colleague hot food service.”

“Media speculation over the weekend was premature and we have accelerated our communications to colleagues in order to reduce the significant uncertainty created by incorrect information.”

“We will be doing all we can to help colleagues affected by these changes, including offering redeployment opportunities wherever possible.”

Tesco UK Chief Executive Officer said Jason Tarry:

“In our four years of turnaround we’ve made good progress, but the market is challenging and we need to continually adapt to remain competitive and respond to how customers want to shop.

We’re making changes to our UK stores and head office to simplify what we do and how we do it, so we’re better able to meet the needs of our customers. This will impact some of our colleagues and our commitment is to minimise this as much as possible and support our colleagues throughout.”