Who would
have thought that videos of crowds in supermarkets would be a new form of
horror movie?
In the age
of coronavirus, such scenes send shivers up our spines for two reasons.
First, they
represent both potential exposure to a deadly disease spread by random contact.
If that isn’t chilling enough, the second reason is that the scenes tell us so
much about our fellow human beings: how many disregard the global consensus
that social distance is essential for beating the virus, and how many have such
disregard for those around them.
Many people
have no choice but to go to the supermarkets to buy essentials, but the crowds
in supermarkets tells us we are seeing a “life-as-normal” attitude. This is as
much the case in low-income areas as in affluent suburbs.
For the
latter, there truly is no excuse: telephonic and online grocery ordering and
delivery services have exploded into the national consciousness in recent
weeks. Traditionally the most difficult form of ecommerce, due to having to
maintain the “cold chain” from supermarket to home fridges, it is now suddenly
the only form of ecommerce in South Africa.
As a
result, we are seeing the biggest ever spike in both first-time online shopper
numbers and the volume of online shopping by digital veterans. However, this
forced revolution is also exposing the weaknesses of the existing players in
this market – and opening opportunities to the agile entrepreneur.
Take Cindy
Poluta, a veteran sports broadcaster. For several years, she has had the idea
of starting a service to supply fruits and vegetables to homes and offices. She
began having the app developed in November, and the service was ready to launch
last month – just as lockdown began. Suddenly, she had to change her entire
business model.
“I was
going to mainly supply offices in the Sandton CBD,” she says. You could order
your fruits and vegetable for home, and have it delivered to your office on a
certain day. It would make life a lot easier so you wouldn’t have to go out to
the shops. Just as you would order from Takealot and have it delivered to your
office, so you would order fruit and veg from Tree Sweets.
“By the
time the app was finished being developed, by the time I got the bank accounts,
the Payfast account, everything going, it went live, and suddenly everybody
went into lockdown. So, I had no option but to offer home delivery because of
the costs involved of having an app and having a Shopify store, and so on. Those
are quite expensive and they charge you in dollars. I just decided to try Linden
and surrounds, because I live in Linden. People have loved it. I’m delivering
daily, and I’m really grateful to everybody for their support.”
It helps that her husband is a wholesaler who supplies fruit and vegetables to supermarkets – and is her wholesale supplier, too. This allows her to supply her customers either more cheaply or as competitively as the major supermarkets.
“He custom-makes
my orders for me, so he charges me what he would charge retailers, and I get a
delivery daily to my house. At first, I was doing the deliveries myself in my
car, which has been an adventure. Now we are partnering with Uber Eats, and you
should find Tree Sweets on the Uber Eats app. It definitely is a service that
I’d like to offer after the lockdown because I do think people have seen the
value.”
Ironically, the big retailers have given entrepreneurs like Poluta a massive gap to fill by not being able to scale up sufficiently to meet the demand, and limiting their delivery areas to the surrounds of specific stores. Both Pick ‘n Pay and Woolworths have extensive online offerings, but now typically have a three-week wait for delivery slots. They have been unable to scale up their fulfilment capacity to meet short-term lockdown needs, and tend to rely on smaller players who pick up groceries in their stores to meet the demand.
Read more on the next page about the independent grocery delivery apps available.
