Twenty-four hours supermarkets might soon be a thing of the past with the nighttime instead being used to fill online orders.
Former Tesco (LON:TSCO) boss Sir Dave Lewis told an FT forum that large hypermarkets “sell very little during the night” and that closing them at midnight did not have a big financial impact.
“But you can then pick [orders] from that store much more intensively than you would have done before,” he said.
Nine of Tesco’s big stores are open 24/7 and 33 Express convenience stores. During the 1990s Tesco had more than half its large stores open all the time.
Asda, too, has been cutting hours with the number of 24/7 outlets down to 106 from 200 at their peak as people are shopping more online, it said.
Behaviour during the pandemic has accelerated the decline with the boom in-home delivery and click-and-collect meant stores had he fulfilment orders to meet.