Marks & Spencer has allegedly got plans to cut more than 300 jobs in the UK, according to the Guardian.
The UK supermarket chain has been consulting on redundancies among managers in a bid to streamline its business.
Management Trimming
According to the Guardian, M&S has struggled, like many other retailers, with the shift to online shopping. The group is suffering from higher costs, including business rates, while its footfall expenditure is falling.
The Guardian is reported to have seen consultation documents which state that while sales activity across the chain had called by 7.5% over the last two years, management costs have risen.
“This has contributed to reducing store profitability, impacting on our ability to trade our existing stores and open future stores viably,” the documents said.
As a result, over 350 redundancies have been proposed across a range of roles at the business. The retailer hopes to reduce the amount of store, commercial and operations managers and section managers.
Desperate Times
In late May, the retailer said that it would close more than 100 stores in its home market by 2022.
The group said that it needed to ‘modernise urgently’ in order to survive after its second straight annual profit fall and a £231 million charge for a major store closure programme.
M&S even decided to forgo its fiscal trading update when it met with its shareholders at an AGM last week, in an attempt to keep its financial figures 'under wraps' in order to take a more long-term review of the business.
However, shareholders were told not to be overly concerned about its financial results over the next two years because those numbers are ‘not that important to the clothing and food retailer's future’.
© 2018 Checkout – your source for the latest Irish retail news. Article by Aidan O’Sullivan. Click subscribe to sign up for the Checkout print edition.
