What was claimed
Tesco is sacking 4,300 staff.
Our verdict
There is no evidence Tesco is sacking 4,300 staff. Tesco has confirmed this is not true.
No evidence Tesco is sacking 4,300 workers
18 October 2021
A post shared 29,000 times on Facebook claims that Tesco is sacking 4,300 staff and relates this to the use of self-service checkout machines.
There is no evidence that this is happening. Tesco also confirmed that this was false.
The post may refer to the fact that in August 2019, Tesco said it would be cutting 4,500 jobs from its 153 Metro stores. At the time Tesco said this was due to changes including putting stock straight onto the shop floor instead of storing it first, making staff work more flexibly, making the management structure leaner.
It hasn’t announced any redundancies anywhere near that scale since. This Facebook post was first shared in September 2021. A tweet making the same claim appeared earlier, in April.
In March 2021, the store reportedly consulted with thousands of its store managers about a potential restructuring, but at the time industry publisher the Retail Gazette said there would be no redundancies.