Monday, 1 June was very much looked forward to by
several South Africans as the date they would be legally allowed to
restock fridges,
cabinets and stomachs with alcoholic
beverages. As the day progressed, social media and various news sites
were filled with images of long lines of people patiently waiting their
turn at liquor retailers.
But was the surge of people going to bottle stores
really that big, or were the queues more illustrative of the new access
control policies in place, making us wait to enter?
Using aggregated and anonymised Tracker data,
research and analytics company Lightstone looked at the patterns of
behaviour of vehicles travelling to retail destinations to see where the
truth lay. The picture is a bit muddied by the
fact that retail activity is generally higher at the beginning of the
month as a result of most salaries having been paid, and also because many more retailers were allowed to open on 1 June compared to previous weeks.
The data
confirms that on Monday 1 June, South Africa did indeed behave
differently to the Monday of the week before, month before, and three
months before.
Makro stores saw
40% more visitors on 1 June than they had seen on 2 March (the first
Monday in June compared to the first Monday in March), but 10% fewer
visitors than they saw at month-end on 29 February 2020.
On average, the Makro visits in the week leading
up to 1 June were already back up to 90% of the pre lock-down norm, so
it seems as if the spike in Monday’s visits can at least be partly
attributed to the opening up of alcohol sales.
Lightstone cautions that the analysis can only
identify trips to shopping centres – not which shop/s people went to
while at the specific centre. The data
shows that out of almost 1,000 shopping centres analysed that offer a
liquor outlet,
165 of them had more visitors on 1 June than an equivalent date
pre-lockdown (2 March), and compared to month-end in February (with
month end being a usually very popular time for shopping trips).
Shopping centres with a ‘Tops’
and/or ‘Blue
Bottles’ store were on average at
70% of their normal pre-lockdown visits during the last week of May, yet
up to 85% of their normal activity on Monday 1 June. Smaller centres
with chain liquor stores saw
bigger recoveries
than bigger centres, understandably due to the bigger centres having
already pulled shoppers back with non-grocery (e.g. clothing) retail
offerings whereas smaller centres with only grocery and liquor outlets,
now have substantial additional pull.
Looking only at the centres that had the biggest recovery of ‘back to normal retail patterns’, we see that the liquor chains present in those centres were most often a Tops,
followed by a Pick
n Pay liquor. (This view doesn’t consider the independent liquor outlets.)
The liquor stores in the top 20 centres showing the biggest recovery on 1 June 2020 are as follows:
Shopping centre containing Chain liquor store | 1 June against 1 March |
LIQUOR CITY JAN SMUTS – CRAIGHALL
|
500%
|
ULTRA LIQUORS PLATINUM SQUARE
|
369%
|
ULTRA LIQUORS SASOLBURG
|
265%
|
BLUE BOTTLE FERNRIDGE
|
237%
|
TOPS AT SPAR DOORNPOORT
|
198%
|
LIQUOR CITY GLEN NERINE
|
197%
|
LIQUOR CITY KRUGERSDORP
|
180%
|
GAME LIQUOR KLERKSDORP
|
155%
|
CHECKERS LIQUOR MORELETA PARK
|
153%
|
LIQUOR CITY RYNFIELD
|
153%
|
SHOPRITE LIQUOR KUILSRIVER
|
153%
|
ULTRA LIQUORS KLERKSDORP – CHRIS HANI
|
152%
|
PICK N PAY LIQUOR BARBERTON
|
152%
|
TOPS AT SPAR WELTEVREDEN
|
147%
|
TOPS AT SPAR DOWERGLEN
|
146%
|
TOPS AT SPAR THE FALLS
|
146%
|
TOPS AT SPAR RANDPARK RIDGE
|
140%
|
LIQUOR CITY MONTANA
|
137%
|
CHECKERS LIQUOR WOODLANDS
|
136%
|
TOPS AT SPAR OLD FARM
|
135%
|
*Note – this view doesn’t include independent
liquor stores and is a measure of increased attendance at the centre
that the liquor store is in, not increased footfall into the liquor
store itself.