State of the Market

[willendure]

Curiously, the large Tesco in the nearest town always has well-staffed checkouts, so that use of self-service is a matter of preference, and not the only option.

Noticed that too in my nearest large Tesco. Nice folk work there too, and its sometimes even quicker than the self serve, so I use the staffed checkouts.

[willendure]

I view the next election as being a re-run of the Brexit referendum.

Great, because that was a bloody disaster. Now wait, some snowflake is going to cry and get the mods to delete all our posts now.

[Manic]

Most retailers dont employ very many staff at all these days, my local Tesco seems to run on about a third of the staff since self checkout tills arrived.

According to the latest report by the ONS there were 2.76m jobs in retail in March 2025. The four-quarter average, which smooths out the seasonal variations in hiring, was 2.80m jobs in March 2025, 93,000 fewer than at the same point last year, and 364,000 fewer than in 2015.

On a four-quarter average there were 1.30m full-time and 1.50m part-time jobs. The number of full-time jobs is down 117,000 on a decade ago. Meanwhile, the number of part-time jobs is down 246,000 over the same period.



Commenting on these figures, Helen Dickinson, Chief Executive at the British Retail Consortium, said:

“Retail jobs have continued to fall, with 364,000 fewer jobs than ten years ago. More jobs have been lost in retail in a decade than exist across the whole of the fishing, car manufacture and steel-making industries combined. And while factory closures have quickly been met by promises of action, this wave of retail jobs losses appears to go unnoticed by government.

They employ loads, I didn't say they gave them all lots of hours. In fact the opposite, they run on a skeleton staff with short shifts (so they don't have to pay breaks).