Morrisons to Close 100 Morrisons Daily Store Closures
Morrisons is moving ahead with morrisons daily store closures, shutting around 100 company-owned sites over the next few months after starting talks with affected colleagues on 2026-05-21. The company says the stores are among the most challenged in its estate and are loss-making, putting hundreds of jobs at risk.
Where Morrisons can, it will try to place impacted colleagues in other parts of the business, including supermarkets and manufacturing. The plan also shows how sharply the company is tilting away from its own convenience estate even as it keeps pushing convenience growth through other formats.
Rami Baitiéh’s store reset
100 stores are set to go, and every one of them is a former McColl’s site acquired in 2022. That detail matters to employees and local shoppers because the closures are not being spread evenly across the convenience network; they are concentrated in a specific group of company-owned stores that Morrisons now sees as the weakest part of the estate.
Hundreds of jobs are tied to the closures, with the supermarket saying it will seek roles for affected colleagues elsewhere where possible. The wording leaves room for redeployment rather than automatic exits, but the number of stores and the description of the sites as loss-making make the pressure plain.
Loss-making stores, debt focus
£3.1bn of debt sits behind the wider turnaround plan, and Morrisons said that debt had fallen by 46% since Rami Baitiéh’s reset began. The closures fit a capital-disciplined approach: cut the weakest sites, keep the business moving toward stores that can earn a return, and avoid carrying underperforming convenience locations for longer than necessary.
Three major rounds of redundancies this year have already taken the company through a hard restructuring, including the April decision to cut headcount at Hilmore House HQ by around 8%. That sequence shows the closures are not an isolated move, but part of a broader effort to reshape costs while the business works through its turnaround.
Franchise model takes priority
Hundreds of Morrisons Daily stores remain the long-term goal, but the next wave of openings is meant to be franchise-led, not company-owned. Morrisons is also looking to sell some of its company-owned stores to franchisees, which points to a business trying to keep convenience growth alive while reducing direct exposure to stores it now considers the hardest to make work.
For colleagues in the 100 closing sites, the immediate issue is whether they can move inside the group before the closures roll through over the next few months. For shoppers, the change is more direct: the affected stores will disappear, and the company is betting that a smaller company-owned base and a larger franchise network will better match the economics of the convenience market.
