When a Good Day Goes Very Bad for Pick ‘n Pay

If it hadn’t been for a grandmother who was left sobbing on the floor of a Pick ‘n Pay supermarket, it should have been a good day on Tuesday for the supermarket chain, after it said it had its strongest annual growth since 2010.

But the incident with grandmother Iris Beukes got all the publicity, unfortunately for the store chain, and the retailer’s Jonathan Ackerman went on radio to publicly apologise for “a horrible incident that got totally out of control”.

The incident occurred at a Mitchells Plain Pick ‘n Pay, where 59-year-old Beukes, a diabetic, collapsed crying on the store floor after she was apparently threatened with arrest after her five-year-old grandson broke a Dairy Milk bar inside its wrapper.

According to a post on the Mitchells Plain Gangwatch page, two people who spoke to Beukes said that on seeing the incident, a security guard called the floor manager who told Beukes that if she didn’t pay for the chocolate – which she said she would do if she had enough money – he would lay a charge and she would go to jail and the boy would be taken away by social services.

“Pick n pay gave the boy toys and luxuries and the granny was offered R500 but did not take it and left it at the head office,” the post went on, adding that the boy was still shivering from the incident a few hours later.

Ackerman said on radio, “We do millions of transactions every day and sometimes we get something wrong‚ and we got this wrong.” He said the store manager had been “dealt with severely”.

The incident took some fizz out of the supermarket chain’s latest financials. Pick ‘n Pay posted a 26.4 percent rise in full-year profit on Tuesday, according to news reports. Sales grew by 8.2 percent, versus 6.1 percent last year, creating the strongest growth since 2010.