Morrisons has begun consulting staff on plans to close around 100 company-owned Morrisons Daily stores over the next few months, in a move that will affect hundreds of jobs. The supermarket said the sites it intends to shut are its most challenged stores and that every one of them is a former McColl’s branch acquired in 2022.
The consultation opened on 2026-05-21 at 15:45 ET, giving affected colleagues their first formal look at a plan that would pull back from part of Morrisons’ convenience estate while the company tries to steady the rest of the business. Morrisons said it would look to place impacted workers elsewhere in its supermarkets or manufacturing operations where possible.
The scale of the closures matters because convenience has been one of Morrisons’ main growth engines, even as the group has been forced into repeated cost-cutting. Chief executive Rami Baitiéh has set out an ambition to open hundreds of Morrisons Daily stores over the next few years, and the company said it remained committed to that strategy and was still on track with it despite the shutdowns.
That leaves the closures as a sharp reset, not a retreat. Morrisons said the stores due to shut are loss-making and among the weakest in its estate, but it is also looking to sell some company-owned shops to franchisees and intends for the vast majority of new openings to be franchise stores. In other words, the chain is not abandoning convenience; it is trying to change who pays for it.
The move is the latest major change to Morrisons’ convenience arm in the space of three months and the third major round of redundancies this year. The company’s convenience director, Matt Heslop, left in February 2026 after less than a year in the job, and Morrisons later merged its Morrisons Daily commercial and support functions with the supermarket buying team under group trading director Andrew Staniland, a restructure that effectively axed the daily trading team and cut around 100 jobs. Group retail director Martin Dawson now oversees Morrisons Daily stores.
It also comes after Morrisons said in April 2026 that it would cut headcount at its Hilmore House headquarters by around 8%. In the same period, the company said its debt had fallen by 46% since the start of Baitiéh’s turnaround plan, though it still stood at £3.1bn, and it pointed to the economic fallout of the Iran war as adding more pressure to cut costs.
For Morrisons, the immediate question is not whether convenience remains part of the plan. It clearly does. The question is how much of the business can be rebuilt around franchise partners, fewer loss-making company-owned stores and a slimmer cost base without slowing the expansion the company still says it wants.
