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“Train smash” are not words which we of the business press bandy about lightly. But it is those words which our colleagues over at Fin 24 used to describe the state of Woolies’ Aussie operations, where David Jones is now worth half of what they paid for it. At the same time, business is ticking up back here in the heartland, where food sales grew +9% in the second half and total sales 7.7%. Online positively screamed through in Woolworths SA, growing by +28.7% but off a low base – it still accounts for only 1% of the total. Still: Australia, and a resulting decline on adjusted diluted HEPS for Woolies of 2.1%. They rather obligingly also reported on the comparable 52-week period, in which sales were more muted, growing +3.9% to R78.2bn with adjusted profit before tax down -3.7% to R4.6bn. For Ti’s summary of the results, click here. .

Comment: Australia notwithstanding, a picture of a business coming back to full strength. Nice one.

You know it’s going to be bad when they bring in load shedding. And so it roved with Massmart, whose sales grew +5.5% to R43.8bn for the six months through June, but whose costs outstripped those, for a net loss of R832.4m. “Cash-strapped consumers continue to spend proportionately more on our sales promotion activities which causes further gross margin pressure,” they said in an accompanying statement, and also pointed to general elections in two African countries where they trade, depressed GDP growth back home, and yes, load shedding. Outgoing CEO Guy Hayward also acknowledged “various internal missteps”, without specifying the precise nature of these. Throwing a bone to the punters, Massmart mentioned that sales tended to skew more heavily to the back half of the year where Black Friday and Christmas feature prominently. For Ti’s summary of the results, click here..

Comment: Tough times for Massmart indeed. Our sincere hope is that now the only way is up.

Things are not lekker with Oom Christo and Shoprite. “People are always talking to me about the deferred shares,” he grumbles. “But there is nothing on the table right now.” Except, presumably, for an open box of Ouma rusks and a lonely cup of rooibos. He refers of course to the 265 million deferred Shoprite shares, by which he has swing over 32.3% of the Group’s votes. In June, you may recall, rebellious shareholders put an end to Shoprite’s plans to swop the offending certificates for 20 million ordinary shares, valued at R178 a piece. And the share price is not playing nice either: after last week’s muted results, and given the ongoing weakness of the retail sector, punters are looking for other mattresses under which to hide their hard-earned. If Wiese had managed to unload his stock at the 2017 price, he would have realised around R3.5bn on the deal. “A deal at current prices might get him R2.3bn,” says a gimlet-eyed analyst, who preferred not to be named.

Comment: Schadenfreude is that frisson of delight one feels at the misfortune of others. Not something we feel right now vis-à-vis Oom Christo, but there are, we’re sure, those who do.

Retailers are probably the stakeholders with the biggest swing on the war on plastic waste, and have a special responsibility for removing it from the supply chain. Tesco, it seems, is taking this responsibility seriously, with the announcement of a plan to assess all packaging for size and suitability and reserving the right to delist any products that don’t comply. This will enable them to meet their goal of removing 4,000 tonnes of hardest-to-recycle materials from the supply chain by year end. Also in the UK, Lidl has just broached the 5.9% market share mark, its highest yet, adding 500,000 new punters in a flurry of store openings through the summer. All well and good, but the biggest growth of the period came from online retailer Ocado, which grew sales +12.6%. Nice for Marks & Sparks, which recently coughed up £750m for 50% of the business. Over the pond, in the meantime, Walmart is suing Tesla after fires broke out on the retailer’s stores’ roofs where Tesla solar systems are installed.

Comment: A time of change, everywhere you look, at a pace we can barely comprehend.

“What’s up with booze these days?” you ask, and Rowan Leibbrandt, of posh liquor merchants Truman & Orange is here to tell you. Punters are being drawn to smaller, more interesting brands, he says. Women, for example, are taking to the new boutique gins like nobody’s business, and craft beers are continuing to go gangbusters. Super premium rum is a big success, he says, because it offers quality at a lower price point than competitors like whisky and cognac. This would in part explain its compound volume growth of +17% since 2013. Leibbrandt is of the view that liquor packaging should be able to tell the buyer a story, and that they should be able to look at the bottle and know exactly what it’s about.

Comment: Funny, it’s generally booze that enables us to tell stories, but this oke obviously knows what he’s talking about.

We’re not even going to go into the attempted assassination of Zimbabwean cigarette baron Simon Rudland, allegedly by rivals from within the ranks of the Fair Trade Independent Tobacco Association (Fita) of which he is a member. That’s too crazy, even for this sprightly little publication. But we are interested in the request for tenders that SARS has put out for the tracking and tracing of cigarettes, as part of its efforts to stamp out the trade in illegal cigarettes, which they reckon are costing them around R8bn in revenue every year. Problem is, the initiative is likely to put an undue regulatory burden on the small retailers who sell 80% of all twakkage in South Africa. Current revenues from cigarette sales contribute R17bn per annum to the fiscus.

Comment: Which begs the question of who, exactly, is addicted to the little fellers.

The CPI, as expected, dropped to 4% for the month of July from 4.5% in June, driven thither in part by a reduction in the price of petrol. While that may provide some relief for embattled consumers, it’s not all good: electricity went up by +10.5% and water by +10.3%, and a loaf of bread rose +7.9% YoY compared with +7.3% for June. And the fall in rates might not be sufficient to persuade the Reserve Bank to reduce the repo rate, in light of the rand’s current weakness and the ever-present threat of a downgrade by the one of the big three ratings agencies. The fear of an IMF bailout, in the meantime, with its attendant austerity measures in an economy with no margin for hardship, has caused some analysts to observe that the threat might be just what is needed for meaningful economic reform. In one bit of good news our burgeoning new blueberry industry could add as many as 14,000 new jobs to the economy.

Comment: Enough with the interesting times, already.