Every retailer will tell you they want staff that can offer the highest standard of customer service, but which brands are actually putting their money where their mouths are? From Aldi to Zara, we reveal the base rate of hourly pay that 60 of the UK’s biggest bricks-and-mortar retailers offer their shop floor workers
The increase of the national minimum wage (NMW) to £12.21 announced in the autumn Budget may have caused quite the stir among retailers when it hit the headlines last year, but the reality is that the majority of the brands in our index pay their workers a far higher rate.
Frontline shop work can no longer be generalised as a minimum wage job; in fact, our research reveals that the median pay among some of the UK’s biggest retailers is actually 20p per hour above that at £12.41. Obviously, there are still many retailers that offer a minimum wage – 16 within our index – and this list is not completely exhaustive of chain retailers in the UK, but roughly half of these retail brands pay more than the median.
But retailers are increasingly concerned with cost control, so why do so many pay higher wages than they need to? According to B&Q’s people director Andy Moat, it’s a no-brainer for several reasons.
“The environment has become increasingly competitive now,” he says. “Our frontline colleagues fundamentally shape the experience our customers have, so we want to set a really competitive rate that gives us the best chance of attracting and retaining the best colleagues.
“We have a really multi-generational workforce, and we’re proud of that. We’re trying to appeal to everybody within that group, which is why we pay everyone the same rate – we don’t have any age differences.”
“Retention is equally important. Our turnover is the lowest I’ve ever known it. I’ve been people director at B&Q for six years now, and we’re at 29.7% turnover for our customer advisors. That’s really low, which is helpful because if we’re hiring and training fewer colleagues due to better retention, that leads to customers getting a better experience from more experienced staff.
“On the attraction side, we’re seeing about three times as many applicants per vacancy than we did a year ago. We’ve been building our pay story over the last couple of years as we consolidated our paid breaks, and I think that’s definitely offering us a wider choice of candidates. With our turnover at its lowest, you have to assume there’s a correlation between these factors.”
The best-paid shop floor job in retail is with EE, offering a cool £13.12 per hour regardless of location, 91p per hour more than minimum wage and a few pence more per hour than second place, Sky. Both of these retailers also offer a commission on top of this: with EE promising a bump of 20% for being on target. However, if the annual bonus of a sales consultant at Bensons for Beds was factored into base pay, the rate would be far and above the highest at £15.16 per hour.
If you’re in London, the best base rate on our index £14.36 from Tesco, which is also the retailer with the biggest jump between its premium rate and its national rate: £12.64. John Lewis also jumps by £1.45, but its national base rate is lower than Tesco at £12.40.
Of the 31 retailers that pay a London premium, 16 of them pay equal or above the London Living Wage of £13.85 per hour.
Although it seems like there’s not much correlation in pay between categories, and there’s certainly a fair spread of pay rates within each, that doesn’t mean the fierce rivalries retailers share within the market don’t trickle down into what they pay their staff in the hopes of securing an edge over the competition.
The most well-documented one being between Aldi and Lidl, with the former determined to cement its position as the highest paying supermarket in the UK and upping its rates twice in as many months at the beginning of this year. Lidl is the second-highest paying supermarket on a national pay basis, paying 11p more than third place Tesco and 10p per hour less than Aldi.
Among the rest of the supermarket set pay levels out, with Sainsbury’s, Asda and M&S all paying the same rate of £12.60 – coincidentally, that is also the most popular pay rate on our index above NMW and is shared by more than 10 retailers.
Waitrose and Co-op’s pay comes in slightly lower, with rates of £12.40 and £12.30 respectively. Morrisons is the lowest-paid supermarket on our index, paying at exactly the NMW with £12.21, 64p per hour less than Aldi at the top end of the table.
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