COMPANIES: Retailer TFG spends R200m to power up stores during SA’s rolling blackouts

This expenditure by TFG — the owner of Foschini, Jet, Markham, American Swiss, Exact, @home, Sportscene and a throng of other brands — wasn’t planned, but the retail group was pushed by Stage 6 in September to spend money on alternative electricity sources.

In September, Eskom’s coal-fired power stations faced breakdowns, forcing the power utility to implement Stage 6 load shedding. In Gauteng alone, where rolling blackouts usually last for four hours, Eskom customers could be without electricity for an average of 10 hours a day during Stage 6. Thunström said that before power cuts intensified to Stage 6, TFG sales were growing “strong at double digits of between 14% and 15%” during the six months to the end of September. But after September, sales went into negative territory and fell — for the first time since the first two months of the Covid lockdown in early 2020, which forced TFG stores to shut down.

Thunström said the worst-case scenario is that some shopping centres are not fitted with reliable sources of power, especially those in peri-urban areas, and TFG’s sales cannot be protected from rolling blackouts.

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