John Lewis set to reopen all 50 stores from May – but it could take six weeks

JOHN Lewis is set to start to reopen all 50 of its UK stores from May - but it could take up to six weeks to complete.

The department store chain has drawn up plans that will be ready to begin implementing within the next few weeks, reports The Mail on Sunday.

But the plans will only go ahead after the government has given the okay for non-essential shops to reopen.

All of the retailers 35 department stores and 15 smaller John Lewis at Home shops have been closed for a month now following state orders for all non-essential shops to shut down to stop the spread of coronavirus.

The supermarket side of the John Lewis Partnership, Waitrose, has largely remained open during the lockdown.

The reopening operations will see "different sizes of shops... open at different points in time", Andrew Murphy, the group's executive director of operations said.

Mr Murphy emphasised that its won't be businesses as usual straightaway and that the retailer will take a staggered approach likely to be in three stages over three to four weeks.

The first stores to reopen are likely to be ones with large car parks so that staff are able to drive to work if there are still restrictions on the use of public transport.

It's believed there are around 20 stores like this.

The last stores likely to open doors once again will be the larger ones in city centres such as London, Birmingham and Glasgow, where almost all staff need to use public transport to get to work.

Another options the retailer may explore is using private busses to get employees to work if they don't have their own means of transport.

Mr Murphy said the team have faced daily challenges to operations, such as social distancing and panic buying in its Waitrose stores, due to the coronavirus crisis, but that there'd been a shift in crisis talks over the past 10 days or so.

He said: "For the first time we have been properly beginning to think about a restart."

There has been speculation that shops will allowed to open again as soon as the first May bank holiday weekend but the government has repeatedly reiterated that lifting restrictions could cause a deadly second wave of infections.

It's also been assumed that restrictions on public transport use could also be implemented as part of lifting lockdown measures, which many retailers will need to take into consideration.

Mr Murphy also stressed that any plans to reopen will take into consideration safety measures for staff and customers, including enforcing social distancing.

John Lewis has continued trading online through out the lockdown which has eased the financial pressure on the retailer to reopen.

Next, River Island and TK Maxx stopped taking online orders and shut down their websites to keep staff safe during the coronavirus crisis.

After two weeks though, Next reopened its website but with a daily limit on the number of orders it will process.

Although capping orders has caused the site to crash on a number of occasions after the limit was reached within hours of it going live.