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Retail 2025
Retail in South Africa is creative, challenging, inspiring, hard work, innovative, demanding, invigorating, and significantly more. It employs millions of people and gives pleasure to millions. For that reason alone, Retail Network Services is proud to be part of the industry and pleased to be sponsoring the SACSC Retailer Directory 2025.
Finding the right retailers for your centre
The Directory is a valuable handbook for members of the SACSC, who range from developers and leasing agents to centre managements and service providers. Here, at their fingertips and packaged in a focused directory, are more than 250 pages of contact details for retailers who are ready and waiting to populate centres around the country.
As a retail strategist and leasing specialist with more than 75 shopping centre developments under our belt, we’re familiar with the hard graft of finding the right retailers for a specific centre in a particular location, with a catchment area that has its own unique demographic. It’s no easy task and can easily take up to two years to finalise the retail mix for a new development. There are often hiccups along the way. Just when you think you’ve closed a deal with the ideal retailer for your new mall, the situation can pivot and you find yourself back at the drawing board looking for a worthy replacement. It’s useful then to have the Retailer Directory at hand.
A lack of retail depth
While there’s no doubt that we have many world-class national retailers in SA and some very innovative smaller brands moving into the spotlight, we still struggle with a lack of depth and, by the way, there’s an interesting situation developing here. When promising younger brands get snapped up (and who can blame them?) by highly experienced and well-established nationals,landlords more and more frequently find themselves negotiating deals with a handful of retailers who hold all the cards. At Retail Network Services we pride ourselves on longstanding relationships with all our nationals, but perhaps there’s room for a little more healthy competition and different faces at the negotiating table?
In devising tenant mixes for centres, leasing teams bemoan the fact that it’s difficult to find as many retailers with real pulling power as they would like to.Vanilla offerings are there for the taking but consumers are constantly looking for more of the ‘irresistible’, and it’s hard to uncover. Checkers is doing a good job of creating a ‘theatre of retail’ in its stores. Good signage demarcates attractively presented coffee, bakery, deli and cheese areas; aisle lighting showcases products in the best possible light; and the overall ambience is one of warmth and tantalising aromas. Here’s hoping other supermarkets keep up.
The future of supermarkets
However, there’s a question mark around how long supermarkets will remain as traditionally strong anchors of our shopping centres. Increasingly, consumers visit them for day-to-day food needs but order other goods online. Could we see a reduction in the space they occupy? It’s possible, judging by the number of delivery motorbikes and vans whizzing from door to door in South African suburbs.
If supermarkets morph into gourmet food stores of 1,200m² for example, as opposed to the current 3,500m² they usually occupy, they could retain pulling power for a section of the market, but it’s likely that a move away from the supermarket as we know it will reduce foot traffic into centres. Smaller format
stores will have to pull out all the stops to maintain good trading densities, while stores which feed off the supermarket anchors will have to work harder
than ever to retain their customer base.
Are your staff missing the memo?
An issue which is sadly still so prevalent in many retail stores is the sense that staff have somehow ‘missed the memo’. It’s catastrophic to witness how a
store boasting outstanding fitouts and a fortune in excellent merchandise is left in the hands of staff who seemingly have no idea why they’re there and
what their function is beyond sitting at the till and staring at their phones.
Here's hoping that the retailers listed in the SACSC Retailer Directory 2025 ensure that their staff have ‘read the memo’, understand it and commit to it.
Having put their names out there as being open and ready for business, these retailers are clearly driven, wanting to grow their footprint and contribute to
the success of our shopping centres. Quality retailers also make a vital contribution to economic growth through the provision of employment opportunities.
We wish them well and look forward to connecting with them as together we unlock even more retail potential in South African towns and cities.
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