The Week That Broke Me
I don’t complain about work anymore. A terrible week at the office has become normal now. Corporate life is like a jungle. You either eat or get eaten. And if you haven’t mastered the fasting method yet, your chances of ending up in a psych ward are about as high as getting scammed in South Africa.
If you’re wondering what the fasting method is, it’s simple: keep your head down so you don’t look appetizing enough to eat, and never bite first. Lol.
But back to my week. My car overheated. My other website crashed. I babysat four kids this weekend. And I baked, and it all went bad.
The baking really broke my heart. I went all in, and it turned out so terrible it was uneatable. That hurt more than anything else. More than the car. More than the crashed site. More than corporate politics. There’s something about pouring yourself into something small and watching it fail that hollows you out in a way big failures don’t.
Then a friend sent me an article about TFG planning to close up to 400 stores. What does that even mean, just because they discovered online shopping now? That will hurt our economy in ways people aren’t talking about. Every closed store is rent not paid to landlords, rates not collected by municipalities, stock not moved through warehouses, and transport jobs that quietly disappear. The mall footfall drops, the coffee shop next door loses customers, the security company downsizes. One store closure ripples through ten other businesses you never think about. And I don’t even want to talk about the unemployment rate, because that’s exactly what’s coming. Thousands of retail workers, many of them women supporting extended families, many with no safety net, many who’ve done nothing wrong except work for a company that didn’t see the future coming.
Not so long ago, Pick n Pay was trending for similar issues, and by similar I mean issues that hit employees hard.
Then another friend sent me a BusinessTech article about https://businesstech.co.za/news/business/861659/south-african-retail-giant-loses-r19-7-billion-in-five-months/. My heart sank to the pits of my stomach. That’s all I want to say about that one. Some things hit too close to home.
The Pattern: This Is a Reckoning, Not a Downturn
Look at the three retailers together, and a chilling pattern emerges:
| Retailer | Crisis | Common Thread |
|---|---|---|
| Pick n Pay | Store closures, leadership shakeup, share price collapse | Failed to modernize supply chain and digital fast enough |
| TFG | 400 store closures | Over-leveraged on physical footprint, late to unified commerce |
| Clicks | R19.7bn market cap loss | Digital infrastructure collapsed under peak demand |
South African retail is experiencing a structural correction. These aren’t three separate bad quarters. This is the market forcing a hard reset on companies that thought they had time.
They didn’t.
And if the giants are stumbling, what chance do the rest of us have?
Why This Hurts
There’s so much happening in South Africa. We are barely coping while employed. Imagine how those without jobs are living.
With all this drama in the retail industry, there will be even more pressure on the job market. More retrenchments. More closed shops. More families figuring out how to survive on less.
When they say “system delays,” I hear someone’s overtime got cut. When they say “operational challenges,” I hear someone’s child won’t get new school shoes this year.
That’s the translation the financial press won’t give you.
What To Do Now: Get Sharp, Get Strategic, Get Unreplaceable
Here’s the uncomfortable truth. The retail industry is not coming back the way it was. The jobs that disappear in these closures are not all coming back. Some will be automated. Some will be consolidated. Some will simply vanish because the stores no longer exist.
So what do you do?
First, stop thinking your job is safe because you show up on time and do what you’re told. That used to be enough. It isn’t anymore.
Second, look hard at what you do every day. If it can be done by AI, like copywriting or basic data entry or routine customer queries, then you need to build above that. AI is a tool, not a threat, but only if you are the one wielding it. If you are the one being replaced by it, you waited too long.
Third, develop a solid skill that sits at the intersection of human judgment and business value. Strategy. Innovation. Adaptability. Problem solving in messy, real-world situations where the data is incomplete and the answer isn’t in a manual. Those are the skills that keep you employable when the algorithms take the rest.
Fourth, be edgy. Not in a reckless way. In a way that makes you memorable. The person who can translate between departments. The person who spots the trend before the meeting. The person who knows how to calm a crisis or negotiate a deal or retain a customer who was already halfway out the door. That edge is what makes you expensive to replace.
The retail industry is becoming scary. I won’t pretend it isn’t. But scary times also reward the people who saw them coming and moved early. Align yourself with where the industry is going, not where it has been. Build skills that compound. Stay curious. Stay uncomfortable. Stay employable.
The Call
I’m turning this blog into a space where South African economic reality gets spoken plainly. No corporate press releases. No sanitized headlines. If your brand serves South Africans navigating this chaos, let’s talk. The ground is shifting. People need honest voices, not brands pretending everything is fine.
Book advertising space. Sponsor a post. Partner with this platform. Things are about to get rockier in this country. Let’s make sure the people who need to hear it, do.
