Morrisons to scrap home deliveries from 50 stores with 1,400 staff affected

The supermarket says the workers will be offered other roles or asked to take voluntary redundancy as it looks to scale back its online deliveries following the pandemic

Hundreds of Morrisons workers have been asked to take voluntary redundancy as 50 of its supermarkets get ready to scrap their home delivery service.

Around 1,400 employees are affected, who will either be moved into other roles at the supermarket or offered voluntary redundancy.

The 50 stores are located across the country.

The supermarket is making the change because it had to scale up its home delivery service during the pandemic, when many shoppers were not able to visit physical stores.

A Morrisons spokesperson said: “At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic we rapidly grew our store home delivery service to serve the many customers who moved from shopping in store to online.

“As we enter this next phase of the pandemic and with many restrictions now eased, we must now adapt and make some changes to the size of our online operation to meet our customer demands.”

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The supermarket wants to shut its home delivery option in selected stores from October.

But the Morrisons spokesperson said its overall ability to deliver to customer’s homes would be unaffected.

The spokesperson added: “All colleagues affected by these proposed changes will be given the opportunity to either move into an alternative role within our business or apply for voluntary redundancy.

“As part of this consultation process we will be offering all hourly paid colleagues within affected stores the opportunity to also apply for voluntary redundancy.

“We are consulting closely with Usdaw on all proposed changes.”

Last week Morrisons launched a ‘zero waste’ pilot scheme in six of its Edinburgh supermarkets to see if it can operate without creating any landfill rubbish at all.

Morrisons customers will be asked to bring back hard-to-recycle items to the six supermarkets.

These include sweet and chocolate wrappers, pet food pouches, hard plastics such as yoghurt tubs, mixed materials like crisp tubes and coffee pods, ink cartridges and batteries, tinfoil and plant pots.

This will all be collected up and sent for recycling, along with extra material gathered by Morrisons staff in-store.

These ‘zero waste’ stores will also offer more unsold food to customers through the Too Good to Go app.

Morrisons stores will also work with a range of partners to redistribute unsold food within local communities.

The six Morrisons stores taking part in the pilot are Hunters Tryst, Moredun, Ferry Road, South Gyle, Granton and Livingston.

If successful, the ‘zero waste’ store format will be rolled out to all of Morrisons 498 stores across the UK over the next year.

Morrisons also wants to recycle all of the waste it creates across all its stores by 2025.

Morrisons sustainability procurement director Jamie Winter said: “We believe that we can, at a stroke, enable these trial stores to move from recycling around 27% of their general waste to over 84% and with a clear line of sight to 100%.”