Boxer have always seen their stores as more than simply grocery retail. Now they’re offering their customers full-service banking, in partnership with TymeBank, whose EveryDay account Boxer are offering at a low cost with no monthly fees, unlimited free card swipes and free cash withdrawals at tills. And in an environment where sometimes overly complex bureaucracy remains a significant barrier to social mobility, shoppers can open the account providing simply their thumbprint as ID. Goodbye complicated application processes, hello personalised VISA card in just five minutes. The TymeBank offering also comes with 30 minutes of free Wi-Fi in Boxer stores daily, speeding up transactions. Shoppers can withdraw and make deposits, do EFTs and set up debit orders, at any Boxer or Pick n Pay till point. TymeBank is owned by African Rainbow Capital, a fully black-owned and controlled investment business.

Comment: Excellent work, Boxer, who are tackling the challenge of providing SA’s unbanked with a new kind of banking solution head on.

In 2018, 7,800 Clicks employees received a total of R1.3bn in payouts under Clicks’ employee share ownership scheme (ESOP). This year, the second tranche of payments will see them pocket another R1.5bn as payment of the remaining 50% of shares in the scheme. They’ve also received a cool R39bn in dividends for the course of the scheme, as the Clicks share price (and don’t we wish we’d got into that with a little more vigour than we did) has risen +360% since the programme began in 2011. The scheme kicked off with 10% of the Group’s issued shares placed in the Employee Share Ownership Trust to be allocated to all full-time permanent employees, with senior black staff, longer serving employees and pharmacists getting higher allocation. 2,000 of the original shareholders have left the business, but remain beneficiaries.

Comment: Simple genius. A part of Clicks’ ongoing success must surely be attributed to the motivation of staff, who have a stake in the day-to-day operations of the business.

David Jones, the troubled Aussie retailer Woolies bought back in 2014, has just been through its third CEO since the acquisition, with the resignation of David Thomas for personal reasons. He replaced the axed John Dixon, who in turn took over from Ian Nairn (the Aussies knew him as “Een Neen”), resigned. Dixon, you may recall, was given the chop just a month before the sacking of MD for clothing and general merchandise, David Collins. It’s all sounding a bit like the wives of Henry VIII to be honest. Thomas will be replaced temporarily, by Mr Moir himself, until they can find another bloke named David to take over the increasingly slippery reins. After Thomas bailed, two non-execs resigned from the Woolies board, viz. Gail “Davy” Kelly and Patrick “The Davemeister” Allaway.

Comment: Time, perhaps, for Woolies to contemplate the fallacy of sunk costs, and consider cutting that blighted continent loose.

Comment: BDS, which you may recall had a go at Woolies a couple of years back, seem to target the businesses in this great industry we call home, perhaps as they are so familiar to consumers and are easier to leverage into publicity.

Keeping up with the mea culpa trading statements we’ve seen across the industry these past weeks is poultry producer Astral Foods, which has warned that trading profits have eased in the first quarter though end-December, on the back of low consumer spending and high poultry stock. Reduced consumer spending saw a reduction in prices across the industry, and input prices also rose during the period, affecting profits further. Unfortunately, the outlook for the balance of the year is also iffy: with the expected El Nino drought, maize production is likely to be down and prices up, putting further pressure on costs. Last year, you may recall, their results for the same period shot the lights out, benefitting from a low maize process after a bumper crop, and a shortage of broilers in an avian flu outbreak.

Comment: Which of course throws this news into starker relief. Poultry is perhaps the most volatile of businesses, and kudos to Astral for making the solid go of it that they manage to do.

Load shedding, is, as you are well aware, a pain in the neck. Which may be quantified not just in inconvenience or the national embarrassment it is, but also in rand: two billion of them for every day you are trying to figure out when to send emails and when to doodle idly with a pencil on a piece of paper. The bad news is that the problems at Medupi seem to have been caused substantially by a skills shortage which at time of writing shows no sign of abating. The ok news (although the jury is still out on this one) is that, as announced during the State of the Nation, the utility is being restructured into three units – generation, transmission and distribution – and this, it seems, will make it easier to procure energy from more reliable, renewable sources. Another piece of good news to come from Cyril’s Big Speech is that foreign direct investment – a priority from day one of his presidency – is up fantastically, with R70bn coming in during the first three quarters of 2018, compared with R17bn in the annus horribilis that was 2017.

Comment: Don’t curse the darkness, put up a solar panel, as they say. Hopefully the fix won’t come too late for Eskom. As for the economy at large, we’re not so sure.

Not much to report from the international retail front this week, except, rather startlingly, this: German discounter Lidl, which together with Aldi is running rings around all comers in every geography it sets up shop, is looking to “disrupt” as the Millennials are fond of saying, the auto-leasing business, which it rightfully views as cumbersome and analogue. In partnership with leasing platform Vehiculum, they’re running a launch offer which will get you one of super-cute icons of Euro style, the Fiat 500, for €89 per month, for 1-3 years, you choose.

OK Woolies, let’s keep it tidy for a while now. Forget the edgy Valentine’s Day promos and the dicey product innovation practices, and stick to the knitting: providing exceptional quality and convenience in food for South Africans who appreciate that sort of thing. In fairness, though, there is a burgeoning demographic which will take delight in anything the Dapper One does that smacks of, well anything, really.

Taking the pressure off you would-be beaus out there in this age of elaborately choreographed Insta-proposals is the enterprising fella who decided to pop the question at the Shoprite till point where first their eyes had met over a bag of sliced bread and a punnet of mushrooms. OK we’re not sure if that’s how it went down. But apparently it all went very well, with the teller was even more excited than the bride-to-be.

Mondelez has lost a battle in the UK Court of Appeal to prevent its distinctive purple packaging from being used by rivals such as Nestlé on their own chocolate products. It’s all pretty arcane and has something to do with the extension of a trademark including both a full and partial coverage of any given pack. For the design buffs out there, the colour in question is Pantone 2865c. If you ask us, the world is a richer place when great brands can own colours, leaving other great brands to come up with their own gimmicks.