A very slow news week, we’re sorry to report, so here are a couple of items from Woolies that might otherwise have escaped our attention. First up: the Dapper One’s ill-fated Antipodean subsidiary, David Jones, lost only A$15m in the last financial, and not A$50m incorrectly reported elsewhere. This notwithstanding “it is the Group’s intention to stem these losses and bring the DJ Foods business to a breakeven position during FY22,” say Woolies. Back home in the Beloved C., and hot on the heels of the opening of its new stand-alone liquor concept launch, Woolworths is offering a new virtual WCellar experience. The WCellar Wine Club is a virtual community space for like-minded people and offers customers digital access to its expertly curated wine selection, exclusive discounts, event invitations, and monthly virtual tastings with winemakers and industry experts.

Comment: Let’s face it, a virtual wine tasting seems unlikely to replace the real thing. But Woolies is pushing hard to claim this space and opening a virtual front before anyone else does seems like a canny move.

The Shopping Mall: is it dead? Discuss. “Pish!” says Vukile Property Fund CEO, Laurence Rapp. Not to mention “Tosh!” “Every time restrictions were lifted the customers flocked back,” he says of the seemingly endless string of COVID shutdowns. “Are we seeing a situation where shoppers are not going to come back? Where they'll spend their lives sitting at home shopping online?” he asks rhetorically. “I think we can say comfortably that hypothesis has been proved incorrect,” he ventures. Vukile is the owner of Mdanstane Mall, inter alia, and the business reports that its vacancy rate has held steady over the past year or so. Rapp acknowledges that in an omnichannel world, bricks and mortar still has its place, with 91% of punters saying they prefer a mix of online and traditional shopping. And there’s a bit of wiggle room, locally: in South Africa, online sales still make up only 2% of total retail sales compared with 16% elsewhere.

Comment: On a cautionary note, you don’t need to lose all of your shoppers to go out of business in a marginal sector like ours.

Tesco and Carrefour have announced that they are ending a purchasing alliance they had originally set up to cut costs. This decision, they said, had nothing to do with the Norman invasion of 1066, the Napoleonic Wars, or Brexit, although they do admit that the latter did complicate their arrangement. Cue sighs of relief from Nestlé, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. In other news of British retail, the Russian Aldi, Mere, is setting up shop on that rainswept archipelago, planning 300 stores over the next decade. Mere stores are set up as warehouses, with suppliers delivering to stores with just 1,200 items in stock and eight staff, and there are 3,200 of them globally. And in other warehouse news, Amazon are trialling a pair of new robots in their fulfilment centres: Ernie, who will reach for items that are low or high on the shelves to deliver them to human employees, saving back strain, while Bert will navigate autonomously through the facilities at speed, saving their feet.

Comment: And, one supposes, saving them from eventually having to have a job at all…

The words “Marmite shortage” will spark wildly different emotions in different consumers, and that’s fine. It is, after all, one of the most divisive foods in the world, with entire regions taking against it, and defenders who verge on the fanatical. Be this all as it may: Marmite shortage, again. Last year, the COVID prohibition caused a slowdown in the production of brewer’s yeast, a by-product of brewing and a key ingredient of the savoury spread. Quality yeast remains at a premium, say Pioneer Foods, makers of Marmite, and there’s nothing that can be done about this, although shortages should ease in August. The business (owned by PepsiCo) re-started production in October of its traditional 125g jars before picking up production of the 250g monsters that have gained in popularity in these profligate times. Interestingly, Pioneer still has plenty of the mixed yeast used in the production of Bovril.

Comment: Of course, no one has ever truly gotten to the bottom of a jar of Marmite, so you might have to spread it thin, but you’ll never be totally out.

Big up to Le Grand Bleu, which has announced that it has under development the world’s first-ever paper-based laundry detergent bottle. A prototype has been developed for leading laundry brand OMO (known in other geographies as Persil, Skip, or Breeze; in the case of Australia, as Skippy) and is set to debut in Brazil by early 2022, with roll-out planned in Europe and other countries soon after. Unilever is also piloting the same technology to create paper-based hair care bottles. The bottles are sprayed inside with a proprietary coating that repels water, enabling the paper-based packaging material to hold liquid products, overcoming the ongoing challenge of coating paper packaging with unrecyclable plastic or foil layers.

Comment: Unrelated-ish, but there is a company out of Canada called Tru Earth, that brings to market solid-soap laundry sheets, which produce even less waste than recyclable packaging does, and that will no doubt be bought out very soon, probably by Unilever.

Released by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), and the Rockefeller Foundation, “The Interlinkages Between Multidimensional Poverty and Electricity: A study using the global Multidimensional Poverty Index” is a bit of a mouthful. But one that provides much food for thought. As government after government fiddles while Eskom faffs, it’s not just businesses and people trying to binge Schitt’s Creek who are really suffering – it’s the vast and growing ranks of South Africa’s poor. The report shows that electricity is a component in 99% of multidimensional poverty indicators, and that half of the billion people globally without power are children under 18, who are unable to read, study or play after sunset. “The social consequences of lack of electricity are major,” says former StatsSA Statistician General, Dr Pali Lehohla. “They will wipe out the gains that were made under the flagship of the Reconstruction and Development Programme.”

Comment: Our solutions to this crisis need to be urgent, creative and flexible. And aimed at the people who need them most.