Saying goodbye to retired Dutchie Luscos

Dimitri Luscos, affectionately known as Dutchie, is well known as the original owner of the Squeeze-In SPAR and until his official retirement on March 1 the owner of Pick n Pay Newmarket @ Lemon Tree.

Dutchie was born in 1945 in Tete, Mozambique, where his family resided.

“The doctor passed the death sentence on me,” said Dutchie. “He said to my father if you don’t take him out of here and he gets malaria once more he would die.”

Dutchie had developed a resistance to the malaria medication used to fight off the disease. After looking everywhere for boarding schools, both in the then Rhodesia and South, where all the beds were full, they found him the last bed in a convent in Nigel.

“That’s where I spent my youth from the age of seven.”

When he was 12 his parents settled in Benoni.

Tricks of the trade

“That is where I learnt my trade,” said Dutchie. “My father owned a café on the corner. At the age of 13, I was left to run the store on my own for three months with my mother’s help.

“I remember one day I took money to the bank and the manager saw me and asked: ‘What the hell are you doing here?’. I told him I was banking. He said: ‘What? Thirteen years old and your walking to the bank with that paper bag of yours? That’s the last time you do that. The next time you have money to bank, you call me and I’ll send somebody to pick you up’.”

The family moved to Alberton when Dutchie was in matric, where his father bought another café. This was to become the original Squeeze-In when his father sold him the property after returning from a year at university.

“We called it Squeeze-In because of how small it was,” said Dutchie. Two years later he outgrew the store and moved to new premises down the street, which was about five times the size of the original store.

He at this stage built a house in Alberante, where he lived with his wife and adopted children.

“Then I found a piece of ground and built my first SPAR store,” said Dutchie. “At that stage it was one of the biggest SPAR stores in the Vaal Triangle.”

This is also when Dutchie visited the United States for the first time to visit their supermarkets and chains head office to learn more about how to run a successful supermarket.

“That’s where I learnt you don’t bank percentages, you bank cash,” said Dutchie.

This lesson has stuck with him through the years and has been a key factor in his success.

“We were the first to introduce senior citizen discounts,” said Dutchie.

He opened two more SPAR stores, one in Vereeniging and one in Vanderbijlpark. He later sold these two premises and opened a store in Brackenhurst and another in Verwoerdpark.

In 1990, he sold the stores and originally entered retirement.

“I retired for two years and then got tired of retirement,” said Dutchie.

He bought his first Pick n Pay in Honeydew due to not being able to trade in Alberton. At around the turn of the century, he retired a second time.

“I took a break of around three years. I got on my wife nerves because I had nothing else to do. She said: ‘I can’t handle this anymore, go back into business’.”

Opening the Alberton store

That’s when they found the store in Alberton at Lemon Tree. When they were negotiating, Pick n Pay would not allow him to open the size store he wanted to.

“They would only allow me to open a store of 2 500m². Between myself and the landlord we pushed it to 2 800. So we expanded before we opened.”

At that stage Pick n Pay was apprehensive because according to Dutchie, they had been unable to make it work at the location. However, when the store opened on October 22, 2005, they grossed R4.8-million in just a few days left in the month.

From then on the store just went from strength to strength, expanding again to nearly 4 000m². When competitors popped up in the surrounding areas, the store expanded again to the current size of 8 700m².

In 2020 Dutchie’s wife died after struggling with dementia.

“The lord took her,” said Dutchie. “I then went down to Umhlanga for two weeks by myself. I asked the Lord what to do now and a small voice said to me sell it.”

Dutchie chose to sell the store to Bruno Barradas due to knowing his capabilities and knowledge that he could take the store to the next level. Dutchie will still be coming into the store to assist at stages, at Bruno’s request, but is looking forward to travelling around the world in his retirement.

“Throughout everything, I have to say thank you to the Lord. It is through his blessings that I was able to do what I did. The glory does not belong to Dutchie but to Him.”