Pick n Pay has a new CEO...but does he have a clue?

...earnings per share from continuing operations are 31% lower. The dividend is down by 36%...

 The new CEO, Richard Brasher, has been on the job for just 2 months. Last week he was a guest on a popular local finance program (click link above for a transcript), speaking of his plan to turn the slowly sinking giant around. But I am not sure he really understands the reason South African shoppers are abandoning his supermarket chain in favour of the competitors. Below is a copy of the email I sent to him this afternoon...

Dear Mr. Brasher:

Last week I heard you speak on MoneyWeb on Radio 702. I thought you'd like to know why I stopped shopping at Pick n Pay and why my venture into a store today only firmed my resolve.

I live near the Woodmead Pick n Pay Hyper, but have also done considerable shopping at the Morning Glen, Morning View, Sunninghill, Northgate and Douglasdale stores. With the exception of the issues with the pharmacy, which is limited to the Woodmead store, my remarks apply to all of the Pick n Pay stores I have patronized.

The ineptitude of your pharmacy nearly killed my husband. He is diabetic and takes numerous medications for that condition as well as hypertension and hyperlipidemia. He picked up a set of his repeat meds from your pharmacy on one occasion last year and the pharmacy had neglected to put in his blood pressure meds. Because he takes so many meds, he did not realize at first that one of them was missing and so he went for more than a week without his blood pressure meds. He found out when he started having symptoms of dizziness and laboured breathing and I took him to the hospital where they discovered his blood pressure was at stroke level. He didn't receive his meds but you can bet our medical aid was billed for them as well as the emergency room visit necessitated by your pharmacy's deplorable oversight. While this was by far the worst incident of the pharmacy's ineptitude, it was far from the only one. Almost every month your pharmacy was either out of stock on such staples as insulin pens and needles and commonly prescribed meds (I can understand not having a stock of rarely prescribed meds, but insulin? glucophage? blood pressure meds? statins?). What is even worse than being out of stock is having to count my meds upon receiving them because your pharmacy chronically shorted me on my meds. The prescription would call for 30 tablets, the pharmacy would either short me a whole card or fail to give me a partial card to make up the whole 30. So, I would bring in a prescription for 30 tablets and receive 28, which is neither what the doctor prescribed nor what our medical aid paid for. After numerous complaints to the pharmacy manager and even the store manager...which garnered us apologies and promises but no action or improvement...we have taken our medication business to your competitors. We have not used your pharmacy for nearly six months now: between Pharmacy Direct and DisChem, our needs are handled adequately and Pick n Pay has lost thousands of rand per month in revenue to the pharmacy with our move elsewhere. We are both diabetic, hypertensive and hyperlipidemic--I take five different drugs plus my insulin, my husband takes even more than I do: we are walking wallets when it comes to revenue from medications and your pharmacy drove us away with its lackadaisical attitude regarding our health and even our lives.

I have pretty much switched to Woolworths for my grocery shopping and to Makro for cleaning and pet supplies. But there are always a few things they don't carry and so I periodically pop into a Pick n Pay for those items. I did so this morning and as a result of my visit, have decided to simply skip Pick n Pay from now on and just stop in at Spar or Checkers for those items. Why? Because you have either discontinued items I normally buy or you cannot seem to keep them in stock. Coupled with the unappetizing condition of your fresh produce, I just cannot see why I should waste my time even going to a Pick n Pay because, based on several years of increasingly dismal experiences with your stores, I am just wasting time and energy going there. This morning I stopped in for just two items, items I have been purchasing from Pick n Pay for nearly ten years, items I have not seen on the shelves for the last couple of months: Kraft Miracle Whip and netted bags of rawhide "bones" for my little dogs. In the past I have seen your stores be out of stock for months (literally) of Pick n Pay's own brand of kidney beans, crush tomatoes and tomato puree. At one time you carried Dairy Belle Colchester cheese in slices...I haven't seen it in years, now. At one time you carried Maruchan Cup-of-Soup but it has probably been a year since I've seen it: you substituted an inferior self-branded product that is more difficult to use and less tasty (the noodles taste like cardboard) and you don't bother to even keep that adequately stocked, leaving only the Maggi brand well stocked, which tastes disgusting.

I don't know if your employees intentionally dissemble to the customers, but I recall coming into a Pick n Pay store and finding no fresh chicken. This happened several weekends in a row and finally somebody taped a sheet of paper to the empty section saying that there was a "shortage of chickens." Really? Then why did Woolies and Spar have them? I have gone to multiple Pick n Pay stores looking for frozen peas...at one store someone had taped a similar sign inside the freezer...and yet I could find frozen peas at a Spar and Woolies. And who is the person responsible for scheduling bread deliveries? Maybe someone should tell him/her that weekends tend to be busier than weekdays and he should order extra for the weekend shopping...I cannot tell you how many times I have walked into a Pick n Pay store on a Sunday for bread and the shelves are virtually empty.
I am appalled when I walk in the store and find entire shelves empty. I was in the pet food aisle this morning and literally saw a dozen or more metres of actually empty shelves. The various treats I regularly buy for my dogs (four of them--that is a lot of biscuits) were out of stock. I have seen your stores fail to stock some items, like Beeno Chocolate-coated biscuits, Beeno Chocolate Drops, and Beeno Yoghurt drops for months--no exaggeration--at a time. It has been a month since I have seen Dentastix (the kind with the green filling) in your stores. I went to the pasta aisle this morning and found empty shelves there. I once waited eight weeks for the Woodmead store to restock beans and dishwasher rinse aid...both store brand...and finally had to approach a manager to find out if the items had been discontinued. On my subsequent visit I inquired as to the reason for the lack of stock (as the items had been restocked in the intervening week) and was told that the individual responsible for monitoring and reordering stock had simply failed to place the order: the system reflected the lack of stock but the operator simply did not reorder. Guess what? Within the month those shelves were empty again.

The worst thing about the empty shelves is that it looks to me like it is a part of your business plan. When I first came to South Africa ten years ago and walked into a Pick n Pay for the first time, I saw a card on the shelf in the place boxes of breakfast cereal should be. That card was professionally printed, not something someone ran off on the computer to deal with an unexpected shortage. It was a professionally printed "tent" card intended to stand in the empty shelf and printed on it was something to the effect of "Oops! We are out of this product____________. " In other words, the unstocked shelf issue is so common to your stores that you spend money to have "Screw you, go buy it from our competitors" cards printed up to put on those empty stretches of shelves.

Why should I shop in your stores? The stuff I want to buy is not there...we are down to TWO products I relied on Pick n Pay to carry and now you don't have those any more. I spend more than R1000 per week on groceries and another R1000+ per month at Makro on items I used to buy at Pick n Pay. Hypermarts should be the answer to a busy person's prayer---everything under one roof---but if I have to go to your competitors to buy the stuff I want, kindly explain to me why I should burn either my petrol or my time going to a Pick n Pay, because personally, I don't see any reason at all.

The bottom line for any retail business is that in order to make money, you must have stuff to sell. And if you want to do very well at making money in retail, you have to have stuff that your customers actually want, and in sufficient abundance that there is enough for all of them. You aren't selling shoes, where people come in, buy one two items and leave, you are in a business in which people buy dozens upon dozens of different items with each visit. Discontinuing (or failing to adequately stock) items that customers want is akin to cutting your own throat. When the list of discontinued or unavailable items that a shopper must buy elsewhere becomes large enough, the customer will simply go elsewhere for the whole shopping...and your loss of marketshare over the past few years should have amply demonstrated that. Pick n Pay is still the most convenient store, location-wise, to my home but until and unless you address this lack of stock issue, I am not going back.
Regards,

**Sweet Violet**
Sandton

All the eggs are brown!

Originally published March 31, 2004

While preparing breakfast for my husband this morning it suddenly struck me that I haven’t seen a white egg since I got here. Not that the color of the eggshell makes any difference to me…it doesn’t…but in America most of the eggs are white-shelled and brown-shelled eggs cost more because they are (inaccurately) perceived to somehow be healthier than white-shelled ones. This set me to pondering some of the differences between South Africans and their food and Americans and theirs.

I’ve been doing my grocery shopping here for several weeks now, and have, after trying various markets, settled on Checkers as my primary source of food. I go to Woolies for premium stuff, I try to get my produce at the open air markets at the Rylands and most of my meats at a couple of butcheries (I have a particular favorite for boerewors in Parklands), my “uh oh, we’re out of bread” supplies at the closest market, a Pick n Pay, and everything else at Checkers…cleaning and paper supplies, juice, milk, cheese, bread, etc. In my search for delectable things to please my husband’s palate, I have made quite a few discoveries about how South Africans eat, at least as perceived by the people who sell the food.

1) South Africans have a considerable sweet tooth! I was strolling down an aisle at the market the other day looking for a product and realized that there was an entire aisle devoted exclusively to sweets! The whole length of the aisle! I was amazed! Americans are perceived as being a sweet-loving people, but I’ve never seen anything like it in America! When you look for marshmallows in the US, for example, you have only three choices: minis, full-sized, and sometimes colored marshmallows; and there are generally only two brands to choose from: Camp Fire and the store’s generic brand (which was probably made by Camp Fire). The marshmallow selection here would just about take up the entire candy portion of an American supermarket! Multiple brands, shapes, colors, sizes, even flavors…you have more variety in marshmallows alone than Americans have in trendy coffees! And then there were the candy bars!! My goodness…such choices! I wandered the candy aisle wondering if I had died and gone to Chocoholic Heaven! But being a good little girl (who is nearly at the end of her household budget for the month) I resisted the urge to splurge and indulge my chocoholic tendencies. I get my budget account renewed tomorrow…who is kidding whom?...there is a reason I am putting off buying groceries until then!

2) South Africans are real carnivores! It is inconceivable in America to have shops that sell nothing but jerky (biltong). On my first visit here, a year ago, I was fascinated by the biltong shop in the local strip mall because something like that could never make enough profit to survive in America. Jerky, as biltong is known in America, is sold in little sealed plastic packets that are kept beside the till in convenience stores like 7-11. And it is never made from game meats, only beef, with various treatments to alter the taste (pepper, chili, teriyaki, etc.). And dried sausage? Never saw it before I came here (and I come from a family in which my father made his own venison jerky after a hunting trip, and my grandfather prided himself on his homemade sausages). The variety and quantities and quality of meats here is stunning! The beef is deliciously tender and flavorful (although I am having to relearn the names of cuts of meat because what they call a porterhouse here does not bear even a vague resemblance to a porterhouse in California), lamb is plentiful, and I have never, ever seen mutton in a market before, or game meats, for that matter. Some of the best boerewors (which is also unknown in America and a particular favorite of mine!) I have eaten here was made from game meat and purchased at a SuperSpar. South Africans seem inordinately proud of their braais, but because virtually every household in America has at least a kettle-type barbeque and cooks on it frequently, the braai, of course, was initially no big thing to me. But the meats that are to go onto those braais…what choices we have here and how wonderful they are! Marinated chickens already flattened to braai well, tasty pieces of meats already on skewers, boerewors...virtually all Americans have barbecues, but South Africans have elevated the concept almost to an artform! YUM!

3) South Africans…or at least Capetonians…have a thing about calamari that I neither share nor understand. Even if the stuff wasn’t disgusting to even contemplate eating, once in the mouth…ick!! I am astonished at the quantities of calamari served here and the creative ways people have thought of to serve it. I ordered a paella at a restaurant recently, anticipating a bed of saffron rice studded with chicken, mussels, clams, prawns, and perhaps a piece of fish or two. I got a plate full of oversalted reddish-brown goo…I couldn’t tell the mushroom chunks from the chicken bits, but the little legs sticking up from the monochromatic mass like those of a dead spider were a dead giveaway as to the identity of those little buggers. I picked at least two dozen of the nasty little things out of the rice but missed one and it ended up in my mouth…oh, yuck, it was horrid…a gritty texture and dark musky flavor that put me off the entire rest of the plate. EW! as we say in America… eeeewwwwwwwwww! To be fair, I have to admit I am not a big fan of fish in general, and so far the only one I have found here that I like is Cape Salmon (yes, I’ve tried snoek, a local favorite…too oily, too boney, too fishy tasting for me), but that is no surprise, considering that in my entire life in America, I found only four fish that I like…and I am the daughter and granddaughter of avid sportsmen and grew up eating the stuff, courtesy of Dad’s or Grandpa’s latest fishing trip. I like tuna salad, shrimp, crab, lobster, abalone, scallops, salmon, halibut, trout, and catfish…that is, at present, my full range of seafoods that I consider fit for human consumption. Calamari is fish bait. Ick!

4) What fabulous restaurants we have to choose from! Maybe it is just Cape Town, but man, I could eat out every night here…and I like to cook. For my husband’s birthday I found an authentic sushi bar and we had dinner there (prawn and salmon sushi for me, thank you) and I’m almost embarrassed to admit that the California rolls at Maz in Sea Point were better than the California rolls in California. Killer wasabe and delectable pickled ginger! I’ve been to a couple of Indian restaurants, some seafood restaurants (please, Ocean Basket, more offerings for those of us who are merely accompanying the fish-lovers), Italian, continental and quite a few others. I haven’t found a Mexican restaurant I want to try yet, though. I grew up eating Mexican food and the few so-called Mexican dishes I have had here were a grave disappointment. I’ve found a couple of Mexican restaurants but a quick perusal of the menus sent me scuttling away. Trust me on this…I have been eating Mexican food for decades…I lived in the Mexican part of town for years and frequented the local eateries where my rusty, halting Spanish was my only means of communication…Mexican cuisine does NOT include calamari! In the Gulf of California Mexican fishermen catch and sell calamari to the Japanese restaurant industry, but they do not eat it themselves! Any Mexican restaurant in South Africa that includes calamari in their offerings does not get my approval! (I brought a Mexican cookbook with me just in case.) All in all, however, I have found eating out here in Cape Town to be an unparalleled pleasure, from breakfast at a roadside farm stall to lunch at a local mall to dinner in town, it is one of the great pleasures of living here.

5) The produce is fantastic! I’m not too impressed with Fruit and Veg City…the veggies were limp, not crisp, and rubbery broccoli just doesn’t do it for me. But once I found the open air veg market at the Rylands, I’m a happy camper. My favorite food is fresh fruit, and there is a stall there that sells mangoes that must come straight from heaven. I have discovered litchis…never even heard of them before I came here and now they rank in my top ten favorite fruits. I bought the most gorgeous, red red red tomatoes this week, and beautiful crisp snap beans. The cauliflowers and cabbages are the biggest I have ever seen in my life, and my grandfather used to grow his own huge cabbages for making sauerkraut…South African cabbages dwarf anything I have ever seen in Grandpa’s garden! I’m wondering what the apparently national obsession with creamed spinach and yellow squash is, though…they show up as the standard veg with almost every restaurant meal and I gotta tell you, those two rank near the absolute bottom of my list of edible veggies…just above fried parsnips, I think. Hmmm…I think I have just come up with a way for me to whittle down a few of those extra kilos that cling to me like a frightened child…to heck with BioSlim and other quackeries, a diet of calamari, creamed spinach and mooshed up yellow squash should see me very thin in very short order!