The Big Blue ends this year with no fewer than 12 branded stores in Zimbabwe, where they launched their slow-burning African strategy, and where combined turnover with its local partner TM Supermarkets grew 17% to US$196.7million, with Pick n Pay accounting for 30% of that – at a time, by the way, when chief competitor OK Zimbabwe saw revenue decline 7.9% to $213.6million.

If you like a skinny decaf latte and some eggs benedict with the shopping, and you happen to live in the greater Durban area, you’re going to love Waterfall SUPERSPAR, where the clever blighters have just gone and installed a BeanTree Café. (Punctuation. See me.) This BeanTree is the largest of its kind in KZN, and is a new concept from SPAR, which has started rolling them out nationally.

Unilever will, one hopes, soon be receiving a cheque for R3.8million from Durban wideboy and PR practitioner Vuyo Mkhize who so badly mismanaged the Axe Jet promotion this year that the jet in question failed to arrive, leaving a horde of journalists and competition winners on the tarmac, smelling faintly of Tiger Balm and disappointment, their dreams of Ibizan bacchanalia dashed.

Annheuser Busch Inbev will shortly be listing its shares on the JSE as a domestic stock, as a means of getting round a potential barrier to its acquisition of SABMiller, which is itself listed on both the JSE and in London. AB InBev’s domestic listing will enable big investors like the Public Investment Corporation (PIC) to own AB InBev stock post acquisition. Which all seems very honest and above board to us. We’ll watch it all unfold while we sip a nice cold IPA from a privately owned brewer.

Last week, it may have been inferred from our story on Imperial Retail Solutions that they were a lesser-known force in the market. In fact, the ignorance was ours alone. Imperial Retail Solutions, which has recently won such contracts as McCain, Cerebos, aQuelle Water, Distell and GSK, is the holding entity for some very well-known businesses such as VMS, Peak InStore, FMS and Mercor Solutions. All of these are well entrenched in their fields of expertise and have a proud and lengthy heritage.

Massmart have sponsored a survey on corruption in the Beloved Country, and the results are about as pretty as you’d expect: about 75% of all South Africans, when asked for a bribe, either cough up, koka, or k&k en betaal, depending on where they were caught speeding, or taking backhanders from Shaiks or Guptas. And 26% of all people polled in Massmart stores know someone who has been shaken down for a bribe in the past year. Massmart decided to sponsor the survey by EthicsSA as a matter of corporate social responsibility, and in line with its internal anti-corruption compliance programme.