The day before Sports Direct lets the public into its warehouse in Shirebrook, Derbyshire, a rival retailer showed a very different warehouse to the press on Tuesday 6 September.

The £150m extension to John Lewis’s Milton Keynes depot features pastel cardigans, party dresses and fluorescent T-shirts flying past on hi-tech ceiling rails.

Sports Direct’s founder and majority shareholder, Mike Ashley, will be taking note. Ashley once said he wanted to become an employer on a par with John Lewis, the department store co-owned by its workers who take a share of profits every year. But a tour of the brightly lit Magna Park 3 site, with its polished concrete floors, indicates he has some way to go.

The building features a giant Meccano-style set of metal racking, up to 25 metres high in some places, across which garments and green plastic boxes of products are carried to staff at computerised work stations.

Dino Rocos, operations director at John Lewis, says theretailer’s warehouse is designed to take stock to packers – who process orders for stores and from online customers – as quickly as possible.

It’s a world away from Sports Direct’s Shirebrook warehouse, where more than 4,000 zero-hours workers trundle racks of clothing up and down dark warehouse aisles, walking as much as 20 miles a day.

At Shirebrook, the largely unautomated systems are years behind the times, with the most hi-tech gadget after a hand-held scanner likely to be a ballpoint pen.

John Lewis employs 1,000 permanent staff at its three Magna Park sites, which cover 2.4m sq ft, storing 235,000 products. According to John Lewis, 650 of those staff are directly employed by the department store, earning between £7.50 and £9.30 an hour, as well as an annual bonus which last year amounted to 10% of their salary.

At Sports Direct, the majority of staff aged over 25 began began earning £7.35 an hour from April, 15p ahead of the newly introduced national living wage. When he announced the 15p-an-hour pay rise in December last year, Ashley said he wanted to make Sports Direct “the best high street retail employer after John Lewis”.

While Sports Direct’s sales suffered last year, John Lewis has been able to use its superior technology to move ahead.

During the peak sale period last year, on Black Friday (27 November) the business was able to process five parcels per second.