London, England, United Kingdom (AHN) – While High Street retailers report disappointing Christmas sales, supermarkets raked it in during the 2010 yearend holiday.
This year appears to be another banner year for the grocery retailing sector as Britain’s largest supermarkets announced Monday the creation of at least 32,000 jobs as the grocers open more outlets.
Largest supermarket chain Tesco will hire more 9,000 workers as it opens 292 stores this year, while second largest chain Asda will add 184 more outlets and employ 7,500 people, partly because of Asda’s buy-in of Netto, Morrisons will open 19 more stores and create 3,000 more jobs, and Waitrose 39 more outlets.
Sainsbury’s said it will create 6,500 jobs in 2011, part of the 20,000 target the third largest British supermarket chain has set in the next three years as it expands operations in the north, Scotland and Wales.
The new jobs will add to the 2.9 million people already employed by the British retail industry, which is equivalent to 11 percent of the country’s labor force.
The opening spree indicates the resilience of the grocery retailing sector, which is growing at a yearly rate of 3.1 percent and expects to be worth $270 billion (GBP 180 billion) by 2015, according to an industry expert.
However, the new jobs could not make up for the 330,000 public sector jobs to be lost this year because of the austerity measures put in place by the coalition government.
Another sector expected to take a blow in offering employment opportunities is the finance sector. According to a Chamber of British Industries and PricewaterhouseCoopers survey released Monday 30,000 jobs were lost from October to December 2010. It is the fastest pace of job losses in the sector in 17 years.
Another 15,000 workers in the finance sector are expected to become jobless this quarter adding to the 970,000 who have lost work since the onset of the global financial crisis. Just prior to the crisis, employment in the finance sector in Britain hit 1.1 million, but went down below the 1 million mark at the start of 2010 and had not recovered since then.
Despite the sector’s recovery mode, businesses were still laying-off staff to maintain profitability.
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