The sea change in shopping habits brought about by the pandemic has had various knock-on effects, including the need for major retailers to hire more staff to deal with the rapid growth in demand for safe shopping online.

Tesco has been particularly well positioned to benefit from this current set of circumstances, and as a result it announced this week that it will be recruiting a total of 16,000 new staff members so that it can continue to serve its customers who are choosing to shop online rather than visiting bricks and mortar stores.

What is perhaps most significant about this move is that these are not temporary positions but rather full-time roles that will be necessary for the long term. This proves that big chains believe that the changes that COVID-19 has brought about will be permanent rather than a flash in the pan shift that will subside once things get back to normal.

Over the course of 2020 it is predicted that Tesco will generate £5.5 billion from online sales, which is a significant step up from the £3.3 billion it made in 2019 from e-commerce orders.

This correlates with the fact that just under a tenth of its total sales were web-based prior to the coronavirus crisis, while today that proportion has jumped to 16 per cent.

The further good news is that most of the permanent roles being created by the firm will be stepped into by the workers who signed up on a temporary basis when it became apparent earlier this year that rapid increases in online fulfilment capacities would need to be implemented. Hopefully this should also account for many of the major job losses that have been seen at other retailers recently.