Bizarre spaza shop figures

Your recent article on spaza shops, based partly on a Nedbank study, contained several anomalies that are worth highlighting (“Power cuts spark a jobs bloodbath at spaza shops”, April 11).

The article states that the spaza shop economy “represents an economy of about R600m”, although no time period is given (per year? per month?), and that spaza shops employ 2.6-million people. If we assume per year, this means the average contribution per worker is about R230, and if per month it equates to about R2,800 per year, both of which seem impossibly low. This is especially so since the article later states that the 200 businesses interviewed for the Nedbank survey are losing R35,000 in revenue a month due to load-shedding.

One explanation for these bizarre numbers is the estimate that 2.6-million people are employed in spaza shops, when Stats SA’s quarterly labour force survey (QLFS) puts the figure at between 110,000 and 200,000. The QLFS attempts to interview 33,000 households across SA every quarter, and the data collected includes the occupation of each employed person. There is an occupation code for a spaza shop owner.

In each quarter, Stats SA finds between 130 and 350 people in the sample who are spaza shop owners. Translating this into an estimate for the whole country using the survey weights released with the data implies about 80,000-120,000 spaza shop owners. These owners also report how many employees they have. About 60% report no employees, 35% one employee and the other 5% more than one. As a result, the total number of people employed in spaza shops is estimated to be about 110,000-200,000 every quarter. The range is the result of the relatively small sample of spaza shop owners interviewed per quarter.

I would be interested to know where the estimate of 2.6-million people employed in spaza shops comes from, as this would equate to about 16% of total employment in SA.

Andrew Kerr

Associate professor, School of Economics, University of Cape Town