British grocer Tesco ($LON:TSCO) announced that it will close fresh-food counters at 90 stores, putting about 9,000 jobs at risk in the United Kingdom.

Although these cost-cutting measures — which come despite Tesco's best Christmas season sales numbers since 2009 — may have been predicted due to the rise of budget grocer competitors such as ALDI ($PRIVATE:PRIV_ALDI), Tesco's own careers page acted as a predictor for what was to come.

On November 25, Tesco was hiring for 3,763 across its stores. Two months later, its was only looking to fill 1,675 positions, a decrease of 55%.

Nearly across the board, this drop in hiring was for positions that were directly related to counter service and produce, or to general positions at the company.

Title Number of Positions (Nov. 25)
Number of Positions (Jan. 25)
Customer Assistant 923 421
One Stop - Customer Service Assistant 136 121
Customer Delivery Driver - 111 51
Shift Leader 92 59
Cafe Team Member 43 26
Customer Assistant - Checkouts 35 6
Customer Assistant - Nights 32 6
One Stop - Shift Manager 32 31
Team Manager 28 19
Customer Assistant Checkouts 23 6
Customer Assistant - Stock Control 19 6
Customer Assistant - Counters 17 9
Customer Assistant - Produce 15 4
Customer Assistant Produce 14 2
Customer Assistant Counters 13 1

With the rise of discount grocers and automated grocery stores — i.e. Amazon Go stores — Tesco is feeling the crunch and is going to be forced to cut jobs, and it couldn't be clearer on where they were going to axe workers by looking at its own job listings data.

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