Argos creating 300 new West Midlands jobs
Around 300 jobs are being created in the West Midlands by Argos as it prepares for the Black Friday and Christmas rush.
The catalogue group, now owned by Sainsbury's, is opening a new delivery warehouse near Villa Park in Birmingham, creating 100 full-time jobs.
It is also recruiting another 200 temporary jobs as it gears up for the festive season and the online delivery peak day of Black Friday, on November 24.
The Birmingham site is one of a pair of new regional fulfilment centres. The other is in Reading.
Jointly they have added 200,000 sq ft of space, improving Argos’s ability to delivery on the same or next day on 35,000 products across the UK.
Each new delivery warehouse is around 100,000sq ft and will process orders for delivery to customers’ homes and to stores for customer collection. They will work alongside Argos’s seven existing distribution centres and its hub store network.
This includes the new outlet at Wolverhampton city centre's St Mark's Sainsbury superstore, which replaced the previous Argos store in the Wulfrun Centre. It is one of 200 Sainsbury collection points nationwide.
The new centres are also key to Argos's Fast Track service, which has seen delivery sales rise by 31 per cent, while collection sales have jumped 57 per cent.
John Rogers, Argos chief executive, said: “Our new Reading and Birmingham sites increase our Fast Track capacity across the UK significantly, which means we can get more products to more customers more quickly.
"Six million more households now have access to an increased range of 35,000 products, delivered to a location of their choice within 24 hours. This is great timing for customers with Black Friday and Christmas just around the corner. We expect the two new sites to process more than a million items in time for Christmas.”
He added: “We know that we see double-digit sales growth and increased footfall when sales from a Sainsbury’s in-store collection point are fulfilled through a Regional Fulfilment Centre, so we are confident that this will have a significant, positive commercial impact as well as delighting our customers.”
