Lidl will now become one of the anchor occupiers of the retail park, along with JD Sports, Pets at Home, Home Bargains and Poundstretcher. 

Lidl will stay in its current premises until work is completed on the vacant lot in the second quarter of 2019, when it will move into its new premises on a 20-year lease, with rent of £390,000.

 

Homebase had proposed reducing the passing rent by 90 per cent if they had stayed, but the landlord Picton decided to evict them instead of accepting this. 

 

In order to allow Lidl to move into the space, Picton needed to negotiate to allow additional food retailing. Now that this deal is sorted, Picton will move on to try to fill the space left by Poundworld going insolvent in 2018, and organising who will replace Lidl in its original space when ti finally moves out.

 

Michael Morris, chief executive of Picton, said: "By executing a bold strategy of securing vacant possession, releasing a restrictive covenant and working with one of our existing occupiers, we have been able to secure a high quality anchor for the largest unit on the park on a long lease."

 

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By making such a drastic increase in its floorspace, Lidl is making itself even more noticeable in the retail park. Its customer base is likely to increase from this move, but most importantly, so is the number of employees.

 

Supermarkets need a large number of staff, including night shifts and part-time staff in all areas from warehouse staff to cashiers and shelf stackers. 

Very often, supermarkets are still relying on paper timesheets, handed in by their workers at the end of the week or month. The more staff the supermarkets have, the more this inefficient pile of paper will mount up.

 

Getting employees to retrospectively record their hours worked directly onto paper is not only open to fraud and mistakes, it also makes room for human error further up the chain. 

 

What if employees forget to hand them in? Or managers misplace them? This is particularly a problem with weekly timesheets, as the amount of paper generated is gigantic. 

 

Whoever need to transcribe the sheets in order to input hours worked into the payroll program is likely to fall victim to employees’ bad handwriting and forgetfulness. 

 

Thankfully there’s an easy solution. When employees clock in using our clocking terminals (these accept smartcard or biometric data) the information is recorded by the software and can be exported straight to your payroll software.