Here’s one we’re going to file under Shoprite, although it could also appear in the Massmart column: last week, the Competition Tribunal confirmed a consent agreement between itself and The Big Red One preventing the latter from enforcing its exclusive lease agreement clauses with South Africa’s mall owners. Massmart are stoked – even though they’ve discontinued Game’s food-retail experiment which caused Shoprite to enforce the clauses in the first place. “Massmart's position has always been that exclusive lease agreements are intuitively anti-competitive and a barrier to competition, particularly to new entrants,” says Group Corporate Affairs SVP Brian Leroni. In happier news for Shoprite, over a million punters signed up for their Xtra Savings programme within 72 hours of launching after a successful trial at Checkers. That’s 400 per minute.

Comment: The Tribunal finding is good for the malls, too, who need all the tenants they can get right now.

Those Pick n Pay interims we’ve been waiting for then: HEPS, a reliable measure of profitability, was down -38.6% for the blighted six months through August 2020. This factors in both the elevated sales from the pre-lockdown buying binge of bogroll, box wine and hand sanitizer, and R150m in COVID-related costs. Turnover grew +4.2% for the core South African grocery business, excluding liquor, tobacco and clothing (or +2.6% including them), impacted by trading restrictions affecting up to 20% of the Group’s revenue resulting in estimated lost sales of R2.8bn. For more on those results, read our snappy summary here. In other PnP news, the business has joined 20 of its largest suppliers in the 10x20x30 initiative, in which ten of the world’s major retailers (including Pick n Pay) commit to reducing food waste in their supply chains by 2030.

Comment: Waste is the lowest hanging of all fruit and offers massive sustainability gains to almost any business.

Next week, for a knockdown price of R199, you’ll be able to get a while-you-wait COVID-19 antibody test. The tests are administered via finger-prick at Click instore pharmacies, with results coming in 15 minutes, and don’t require the involvement of an offsite lab. They are, of course, only good for antibodies, not for live cases of COVID-19. Rival Dis-Chem, in the meantime, has gone the lab route, via a partnership with Lancet Laboratories. These tests will produce results within 24 to 48 hours, and cost R380. In other Dis-Chem news, the business – which would be well-advised to drop the hyphenation – are making a sizeable donation to Makers Valley, an organisation that has been feeding the hungry during the pandemic through food parcels, vegetable gardens and soup kitchens.

Comment: There was a happy time not so long ago when you didn’t need to offer testing for life-threatening viruses to drive footfall.

Brexit wraps up at the end of January 2021, and Tesco are warning that its aftermath could be attended by food shortages, should there be dislocation at the ports of entry to the UK. These, they say, should not be too long-lasting, and they warn against panic buying of weisswurst, olive oil and foie gras. Aldi globally are eliminating single-use plastics from their value chain, dropping such items from their inventory as plastic straws, plastic disposable tableware and plastic stemmed cotton buds. And in the US, where nervous participants in that great democratic experiment are calming themselves with online shopping, Walmart has announced a trifecta of sales events for the bleak month of November: a post-election stock up of ammo and toilet paper on November 4, a second on Veterans Day, whenever the heck that is, and the third the day before Thanksgiving, when for the first time ever the stores will be closed. The sales all start online before transitioning in store.

Comment: Why yes, Johnny, you do need an app just to keep tabs on all of the Black Friday events this year!

Standing in this week for an entire industry is Tiger Brands, which has let it be known that in these straitened times it expects festive season shopping to shift to the beginning of December from the end of November. “This will be impacted by a prolonged Black Friday period which we estimate to run longer than the original one day due to the adherence of social distancing rules,” says a spokesperson for the business. But all is not lost: “We also anticipate that many South Africans will spend Christmas at home rather than travelling overseas due to COVID-19 which will see a pickup in consumption over the Christmas period,” she remarks. COVID itself has not been too unkind to the business, with consumer demand having increased for rice, pasta, breakfast oats, groceries and in the home and personal care categories, with sales in these categories up +11% for the three months through May to R7.2bn.

Comment: This festive season will indeed be an eye opener, for many businesses. It is to be hoped that those eyes do not open upon blight and devastation.

Unilever has been on something of a tear as a socially and environmentally responsible business lately. It has led the boycott of advertising on social media until after the divisive presidential election in the US, and announced the renaming of its Fair & Lovely skin-lightening cream in India and Bangladesh in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s announced a zero-deforestation policy and the responsible selection of meat, palm oil and soya suppliers. Its recent acquisitions include eco-friendly US detergent maker, The Laundress, and Dutch “vegetarian butcher” De Vegetarische Slager. Is this enough? Even as it warns against ‘woke-washing’ (defn. leveraging consumers’ social awareness for commercial gain) in the consumer goods industry, Unilever has itself been accused of greenwashing by Greenpeace, which suggests that the entire industry participates in a broken system requiring fundamental change.

Comment: It took us a long time to get into this mess. It’s going to require a lot of commitment and strong leadership from businesses like Unilever to get us out.

The UN has a bleak view of South Africa’s short-term economic prospects, predicting economic decline for the year of -5.1% and -7.9%, and warning that 34% of households will exit the middle class as a result of the current economic hardships. Research business Ask Afrika has tracked COVID-19 related fears, behaviours and beliefs since the outset of the pandemic, and reports that two thirds of South Africans are concerned about the amount of food in their homes, that 48% of adults continue to reduce portion sizes, and 47% reduced meal frequencies due both to a lack of food and money, and that 26% of children are going to bed hungry. While government grants and food aid have provided a measure of relief, people report that these have tailed off in recent weeks.

Comment: A concerted effort involving business, NGOs and the government is needed to get over the urgent hurdles of the next few months. Then the same parties need to work together towards a new social compact in which food insecurity and childhood hunger are prioritised and eliminated.