Senior management at John Lewis are deciding which department stores should keep their doors closed permanently once the coronavirus lockdown ends, with all 50 sites “highly unlikely” to reopen, PA understands.
This week John Lewis said they were looking at how they could reopen their branches in a three-phased approach which would take around six weeks.
Today PA has reported management may never reopen some branches.
The news follows the loss of a number of branches of Debenhams from High Streets across the country as well as trouble for Office, Oasis, Warehouse, Carluccios, Brighthouse and others.
The stores were closed at the start of lockdown on March 23 and will not be able to reopen until the Government's new regulations are lifted.
This week John Lewis director Andrew Murphy revealed they have a plan to reopen branches across the country by mid-May.
Mr Murphy said the plan to get things going again would take six weeks to complete.
"For the last four or five weeks the crisis has been intense and the demands have meant we've been dealing with circumstances changing almost daily," Mr Murphy said.
But some stores would open before others.
"Even in a scenario where we are theoretically able to open all our shops on the first day, we wouldn't do that. We would open in a minimum of three tranches," he said.
First would come stores with big car parks - allowing staff to drive to work and not need to rely on public transport.
Another option would be to use private buses to let staff get to and from shops.
Big stores in places like London, Birmingham and Glasgow would stay closed longer.
Mr Murphy added that keeping Waitrose running also gave the store the chance to learn about what could work at John Lewis too.
John Lewis has also kept it's website up and running during the crisis, but said it would still take a lot of work to get stores running again.
There are particular concerns around public transport - with restrictions likely to be put in place and as many as 2,000 staff needing to get to work in a single large shop.
"We're also really mindful that public sentiment has changed and big business will need to prioritise health and safety above all else," Murphy said.
"There will be no headlong rush to get our shops open just because we can."
"We have to recognise that when we first do this we will learn a lot of things that we didn't expect, even though we will aim to get it broadly right.
"We will learn lessons that mean by the time we get to the end we could be doing things materially differently."
