It marks a major turning point for Waitrose, which has not opened any new stores for the past six years amid pressure to cut costs. The convenience shop openings will mark one of the biggest expansions in the supermarket chain’s 120-year history.
It comes after Waitrose’s owner, the John Lewis Partnership, returned to profit for the first time since the pandemic.
In recent years, focus at the partnership has been on finding savings, with John Lewis having cut £300m worth of costs in recent years. It has said it needed to strip another £600m out.
Mr Bailey told the Telegraph last September that he had needed to “be careful about the shops we were investing in” during Covid and the cost of living crisis, but that the partnership was starting to be able to invest in stores again.
He said: “We’ve got really big, well thought through plans about how we go back through the years.”
Mr Bailey said this would include moving out of badly organised and dated stores in a bid to become more “accessible” and appeal to a wider audience.
Waitrose has also been spending on improving customer service, overhauling staff shift patterns last year to help make more workers available at specific times. It has recently launched a similar shake-up in its John Lewis department stores.
It has come amid mounting pressure from Marks & Spencer, which has been closing the gap with Waitrose for the crown of grocer to Middle England.
The latest figures from NIQ, released on Wednesday, showed M&S had grown its market share to 3.7pc in the 12 weeks to August 10 compared to 3.4pc a year earlier.
Waitrose’s market share has lifted to 3.8pc from 3.7pc.
Stuart Machin, M&S chief executive, suggested in June that the retailer would be pushing to catch up, telling the Telegraph: “You could argue we should have overtaken them already. I might even be arguing that internally here.”