Retail two-step a tricky dance

Sports fans the world over will be rejoicing as major sport returns to the screen after long dark months when the only live action to be watched was Swedish trotting, marble racing and the thrills and spills of Belarusian ice hockey.

Yet a flick through the channels shows the many different approaches towards opening up, with the Premier League and the PGA tour going ahead without fans, while in the Balkans Novak Djokovic’s Adria Tour had fans sitting shoulder to shoulder, seemingly impervious to any pesky pandemic, before the final was cancelled.

This one step forward, two steps back approach will be more than familiar to SA’S retail sector, which has suffered from a bewilderingly complex array of regulations as to what can and can’t be sold and when, depending on the level of lockdown and the whims of the powers that be. Massmart’s trading statement tells the story of its progress from April, when it was unable to trade in most categories, to level 3 in June when it was able to operate in all categories apart from tobacco and weekend liquor.

Missed liquor sales alone are estimated to have cost the company R2.3bn in April and May. However, pent-up demand for home improvement products and general merchandise goods helped sales bounce back once trading was permitted, so overall sales for the 23 weeks ended June 7 were down by 10.3% on the previous year. Massmart expects its loss for the period to be at least 50% worse than the previous year, but at least it has secured a R4bn intercompany loan from Walmart Inc to help it through the period.