Load shedding has become part and parcel of South Africans’ lives and recently Eskom announced that in the first quarter of 2015 it will get worse.
The record decided to randomly sample four businesses, who asked not to be named, to gauge how the average small business is affected.
A pizza outlet, car workshop, filling station and hardware store was chosen.
There are many common grievances. Loss of income and inconvenience is at the top of the list for almost all the businesses that was sampled. The manager of the filling station in Witpoortjie says with the current rate of load shedding the station was losing between R30 000 and R40 000 a day when load shedding occurred due to the fact that pumps did not work. Conservatively estimated in a month of ten load shedding days this amounts to R300 000. Due to this the owner decided to install a generator which cost a further R100 000.
The owner of the workshop says he is using battery power and is not directly affected but on load shedding days ordering parts due to switchboards being down disrupts his schedules. He also says it becomes almost impossible to fetch parts on time during load shedding due to traffic lights being out.
“I have noticed there is a huge increase in customers bringing in broken generators. It is also interesting to see how much dealers who sell generators have increased their prices,” he says.
The owner of a hardware shop says loss of income is not such a big problem but inconvenience to both the business and customers is. She does experience a myriad of other problems. According to her the risk of theft during blackouts dramatically increases, cash registers can not be used and she has to trust that her staff does not make mistakes when writing down the stock they sell, card machines do not work and the majority of her customers uses debit and credit cards and key cutting can not take place.
“We have thought about a generator but to be honest the economy is currently so bad that we would rather invest that money in stock for the customers,” she explains. “Clients also get irritated if they come here but we can not serve them properly.”
The only business that had something positive to say was a popular pizza parlour. According to the manager the load shedding “has only been good to us”.
“When the power goes out people still have to eat so we see an increase in our business and operationally are not affected. We also have a small generator to keep the lights going,” says the manager.
He explained they use gas and wood which gives them the edge over their competition since many other fast food outlets rely on electricity.
