As Covid-19 rampaged across Europe in 2020, Primark’s managers could only watch as online rivals muscled in to supply T-shirts, hoodies and pajamas to its locked-down customers.
With no online sales channel, the discount clothing store was faced with total closure and burning through £100mn of cash per week.
The retail powerhouse that was forecast to make £1bn of operating profit in the year to September 2020 ended up making less than a third of that.
But even the toll of the pandemic has not persuaded Primark to finally embrace online shopping.
George Weston, chief executive of the chain’s owner, Associated British Foods, told the Financial Times that while it was “a nice hypothesis” that Covid had changed the industry for good, sending shoppers permanently online, the growth in Primark’s market share compared with before the pandemic suggested that was not correct.
Weston is adamant Primark “is and always has