Mercifully for millions of parents, the right-wing backlash against steakhouse company Spur has fizzled out. This seems pretty evident from Spur’s trading update last week, which showed that sales from Spur restaurants rose 5.4% in the year to June.
For CEO Pierre van Tonder, things are finally looking up after a horrific two years, in which a campaign to boycott the chain, driven by the room-temperature-IQ right-wing, causing the profits of its franchises to dive.
"It was highly stressful," he says. "Especially given the current situation in SA where everything is a political debate. Our financial results were devastated, but we’ve learnt a lot from it, and made a lot of changes that allowed us to move on," he says.
And move on they have. Besides the steakhouses, the group’s total sales rose 7.2%, when its performance from its overseas business, and other brands it owns like RocoMamas (up 7.5%) and a resurgent seafood chain John Dory’s, was included.
But still, the fact that the business was nearly crippled by the small but vociferous group, who made basic errors of fact, should terrify other consumer-orientated companies. It means anyone is vulnerable to such a heist.
The bad-tempered incident happened at The Glen, southern Joburg, in March 2017. It blew up into a social media storm, captured in a video clip that went viral.
In the video, a white man leans over Lebohang Mabuya and orders her to intervene to stop their children fighting. When she says: "You can’t come here and be a bully," he grabs her child by its arm and tries to pull him, then leans over her threateningly and says: "Ek sal you a p***klap gee."
It spun out of control from there.
The man was banned from all Spur outlets after that. Soon enough, "Boycott Spur" webpages began popping up, apparently protesting against his expulsion from the restaurant, while the black woman wasn’t banned.
As Daily Maverick reported, right-wing group Front Nasionaal, which contested the May election arguing for Afrikaner secession from the rest of the country, claimed credit for the boycott. "The boycott brings Spur to its knees, to such a point that the CEO and founder eventually sells all his shares and withdraws," the party said.
(Predictably, this was entirely incorrect. Founder Allen Ambor had planned to retire, and had put his shares up for sale long before).
Still, there is good news, in that the Front Nasionaal seems to have folded after it clocked up just 7,144 votes in May — a 0.04% sliver of the population.
Spur has now hired a large social media team to deal with ‘knee-jerk outrage-bots’
But since that racial incident, Spur’s shares have fallen 35% to R22. It wasn’t the only cause, obviously. All consumer stocks have fallen, since the middle-class has precious little extra money floating about right now. Famous Brands, which owns Mugg & Bean and tashas, has shed 44%, for example; Taste Holdings has plummeted 93%.
About a month ago, The New York Times wrote an extensive piece about the Spur boycott, featuring the views of many of the sort of patrons the restaurant should be glad to lose. "Spur is only for blacks now," said one, who also admitted he wasn’t "very happy" when apartheid ended. But, The New York Times pointed out, the surprising duration of the boycott spoke to how the incident was a symptom of the enduring racial anger in SA.
Now, you could tackle Spur for various things. You could, for example, take issue with its utterly incongruous cultural appropriation of the Native American cliché, its absurd tomahawks and teepees. Or how Spur extinguished a lifeline for thousands of students when it scrapped its eat-as-much-as-you want Salad Valley, which entitled you to a stomach-churning amount of luminous pink sauce for just R10 a pop.
But banning a bully, that was entirely correct.
Van Tonder just seems relieved the ordeal is in the past. He says Spur has regained its lost market share, and has learnt some hard lessons that will hopefully be picked up on by other companies.
For example, Spur has now hired a large social media team to deal with what New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo aptly dubbed the "knee-jerk outrage-bots, reflexively set off by this or that hash-tagged cause".
Says Van Tonder: "We learnt some valuable lessons in terms of our store security, our waiter training, and training of childminders. With childminders in particular, we learnt that you ignore that area at your peril." This shows that it’s the smaller areas of the business, the neglected afterthoughts, that can be your biggest vulnerability.
But it also shows how a consumer-orientated business can be held hostage by a particular interest group, no matter how wrong it might be.
Van Tonder is too polite to say as much, though. "Look, we’re in the business of looking after customers. People demand excellent service and value, and some moments get difficult. And the consumer mindset has changed too," he says.
Maybe, but the right-wing secessionists won’t be happy to find out that they weren’t able to sink Spur. Don’t expect to see the Leaping Teepee Pocahontas Spur opening up in Orania anytime soon.
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