Morrisons has placed up to 200 head office jobs at risk as Britain’s fifth-largest supermarket leans harder on artificial intelligence and automation to rein in costs and shore up a balance sheet still groaning under private equity debt.
The Bradford-based grocer confirmed to staff on Monday that a fresh round of restructuring would hit roughly 8 per cent of the workforce at its Hilmore House headquarters, with the cuts spread across every department. It is the latest and arguably most pointed intervention yet in a wider efficiency drive that has been running since last year.
A company spokesman said the proposals were part of a longer-term plan to streamline processes, automate manual tasks and “capitalise on the potential of data and artificial intelligence to improve performance”. In plain English, fewer humans in head office, more algorithms doing the heavy lifting.
The news, first reported by trade title Better Retailing, lands less than a month after Morrisons confirmed it would make its entire convenience buying and operations teams redundant and relocate its general merchandise staff to a new office more than an hour’s drive away, a move that affected around 100 employees.
For Morrisons, an SME-built business that grew out of a Bradford market stall to become a national multiple of roughly 500 supermarkets and a clutch of convenience stores, the squeeze is familiar territory. The chain has struggled since Clayton Dubilier & Rice, the American private equity group, took it private in 2021 in a transaction that piled £6.6 billion of debt onto its balance sheet.
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