John Lewis plans to close its in-store currency exchange desks and gift-wrapping services, putting around 200 jobs at risk, The Guardian reported on July 7, 2026. The company is consulting with affected staff before making a final decision. If it goes ahead, the closures are expected in autumn 2026.

These are not small services. John Lewis has 36 department stores across the UK. Currency desks operate in 30 of them. Gift wrapping is offered in 25. They are standard features in most stores, not experimental services in just a few locations. After the closures, people will still be able to order foreign currency online to be delivered to their home or picked up in store.

John Lewis says this change makes sense because most customers asking about currency or gift wrapping are already helped by staff on the shop floor, not by the dedicated people at these service desks. So the company frames this as tidying up overlapping services rather than removing support.

Why is this happening?

John Lewis has been cutting costs for a while. The company cut 3,300 jobs in 2025, bringing total staff numbers down to 65,700. Around 1,500 of those job losses were in the department stores. In March 2026, the company said it would look for more savings through self-checkout technology and artificial intelligence systems. Closing these service desks fits into that pattern — the company is trying to let technology and existing shop floor staff do work that used to require dedicated service desks.

Interestingly, currency exchange used to be something John Lewis promoted as a strength. In 2018, the company reported that foreign currency sales through its desks had jumped by 61% in a single year. The company highlighted this as an area of real growth. Whether that continued after 2018 is not being discussed in the current reporting, but it is notable that a service once celebrated for success is now being closed.

The disagreement over whether staff are ready

Workers at John Lewis have already objected. One employee told The Guardian that shop floor staff are already working flat out with too much to do and too few people. If that is true, it challenges the company's argument that floor staff can easily take on the extra customer questions currently handled at the dedicated desks.

John Lewis's leadership counters with customer satisfaction data. A company spokesperson said that customer satisfaction and loyalty scores have improved every year, and that John Lewis is the top retailer in the UK. This lines up with an industry satisfaction ranking that places John Lewis second, just behind Nationwide. So the company has real numbers to point to, even though these scores do not directly tell us whether removing dedicated service points will change customers' experience.

This is a familiar pattern in shops: companies boast about high satisfaction scores while cutting staff and services. It is not necessarily wrong — satisfaction scores measure what happened in the past, and these desks may simply be expensive to run compared to how many people use them — but the two claims pull in different directions. The consultation period will show whether John Lewis sticks with these closures, and how many jobs are actually affected.