Premium supermarket Marks and Spencer has announced a new store will be opening in Leeds this year.
The new store will open in White Rose Shopping Centre, predicted to be summer time. It comes as company bosses have announced plans to open 20 new stores across the UK. This will include eight full-line stores selling both food and clothing, and 12 new food halls.
It will create 3,4000 jobs. A new shop is expected to open in Barnsley in Autumn 2023. The new openings will see M&S invest £480million in new stores and comes under a wider restructure of its business, Mirror Online reports.
Some of the new sites will be located in shopping centres, including the Birmingham Bullring, Trafford Centre in Manchester, Leeds White Rose, Liverpool One and Lakeside Thurrock. All five of these new full-line stores will be converted from old Debenhams sites.
M&S last year revealed it would reduce the number of its full-line stores by 67 to 180 over the following five financial years. However, it will open 104 more Simply Food shops - taking the total number of its food-only sites from 316 to 420.
M&S is aiming to save £309million in rent costs through this huge business shake-up. Stuart Machin, chief executive of M&S said: "Stores are a core part of M&S’s omni-channel future and serve as a competitive advantage for how customers want to shop today.
“"Our store rotation programme is about making sure we have the right stores, in the right space and we're aiming to rotate from the 247 stores we have today to 180 higher quality, higher productivity full line stores that sell our full Clothing, Home and Food offer whilst also opening over 100 bigger, better food sites."
The first of the new shops confirmed so far are:
- Purley Way (expected Summer 2023)
- Leeds White Rose (expected Summer 2023)
- Liverpool (expected Summer 2023)
- Birmingham Bullring (Autumn 2023)
- Lakeside Thurrock (Winter 2023)
- Trafford Centre (Winter 2023)
- Stockport (expected Summer 2023)
- Barnsley (expected Autumn 2023)
- Largs (expected Winter 2023)
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