Brian Coppin, who along with his brother Mike opened the first Fruit & Veg City in Cape Town in 1993, watched aghast on Monday morning as images flooded his TV screen of hundreds of looters methodically carrying out thousands of rands worth of his stock.
The scenes were most flagrant and jaw-dropping at the Food Lover’s Market at Jabulani Mall in Soweto, where marauding gangs of criminals shamelessly wheeled in shopping trolleys to the store, filled them with everything they could, and calmly wheeled out. It was the same story at the Food Lover’s Market stores in Springfield and Berea in Durban.
Coppin, sitting in Cape Town, watched it all, helpless. Not that he’d have been able to do much, had he been there. At the scene in Soweto, about eight police officers stood opposite the Food Lover’s Market and watched, immobile, as a stream of looters flowed out of the store, carting out stock.
"It was devastating, and it was clear the police were overwhelmed," he says. "People had arrived with angle grinders, and even the shop fittings were taken out. The damage to just those three stores runs into the tens of millions of rand."
Overall, he estimates, the cost to the wider economy of the looting would run into billions. And this cost won’t be borne by the government or some faceless corporate entity: it will be small shops, independent franchisees, and lone retailers whose entire investment has been stolen.
Footage of the looting, broadcast live, was harrowing: unashamed about being filmed, people carried out crates of beer, sofas, fridges and microwave ovens from ransacked outlets. Some of it was farcical: one particular spatially challenged plunderer spent a good deal of time scratching his head trying to squeeze a 58-inch flat-screen TV into his Toyota, double-parked outside a ransacked store — though, helpfully, with the hazard lights on.
Despicably, some parents even brought their children to the stores, to help carry the stolen items. The police, outnumbered, weren’t even in the frame.
For entrepreneurs like the Coppins, it was a bracing reminder of how quickly it can all go south.
It’ll make any sane entrepreneur think twice about putting more money in, if their capital can’t be protected
The brothers first opened two supermarkets in the early 1980s — but that venture was a clanging failure. Undeterred, they bought the old Carrot King store in Access Park, Cape Town, and converted it into a prepacked fruit and vegetable business. This became, in 1993, the first shop, named Fruit & Veg City.
As Brian told Entrepreneur magazine in 2009: "We bought the best we could get, but we sold it at the best possible price, [so] we were able to price our goods between 20% and 25% below the supermarket prices."
Today, the company includes the Seattle Coffee Co, the Fresh Stop outlets at Caltex fuel stations, Food Lover’s Eatery deli and Market Liquors.
There are 550 stores in the group, employing 17,000 people. But if those three stores looted this week don’t reopen, that’ll be 500 jobs wiped out.
Many of those who own the stores today are franchisees — so they carry the risk of the unrest. The Jabulani store, for example, was a franchise.
"It’s the poor franchisee that bears the brunt of this," says Coppin. "At some stage, the store will probably have to be restocked, and it’ll need new fixtures put in, since the store was destroyed. And who knows what the insurer will say about whether this is even covered under business interruption insurance."
If the franchise is lucky, the insurer will cover it — but even then, there’ll likely be a large excess payment due. The point is, it’ll cost a lot of money either way. Coppin says that when it comes to cash flow, an event like the looting can leave a scar for years.
And, more significantly, it’ll make any sane entrepreneur think twice about putting more money in, if their capital can’t be protected from theft.
"It doesn’t augur well for any reinvestment," says Coppin, bluntly. "There are some serious questions that will have to be asked about how much more we can take. As it was, we’ve just endured 15 months of a serious lockdown, and done our best to keep people employed. That’s why this is devastating right now."
In this context, the consequences of this week’s events are as predictable as they are inevitable.
If you were an entrepreneur thinking of opening your own store, would you put in a single cent, or employ a single person, if you knew that when the marauders come calling, the authorities will simply step out the way, and watch as the looters walk off with everything you’ve built?
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