
The spaza sector in South Africa is changing - iafrikan
https://www.iafrikan.com/2020/02/25/spaza-shops-township-economy-business-south-africa-corporate/
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gpaul
This was really insightful. Despite being South African and having grown up
and lived around Cape Town most of my life (the last three decades) this
article is quite illuminating.

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goose847
Agreed. If you’re interested, there’s a book called The Kasinomic Revolution
by GG Alcock that dives into the potential (and importance) of the informal
sector of South Africa’s economy. It doesn’t go into the employee exploitation
that the article covers but has some truly amazing insights.

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rezeroed
South Africa's economy is a mess, and worsening rapidly. The finance minister
was due to present the budget today; I haven't checked up on it. Debt to gdp
ratio doubled over the last decade. Moodys was the only remaining non-junk
rating - may be about to change too.

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lostlogin
> Some were earning as little as R400 (about US$27,22) per month.

I find this horrible to parse, though presumably you get the hang of it
eventually. I assumed it was missing a zero until I looked up the exchange
rate. A grim situation (the wage).

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oblio
Not unexpected:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inequality_in_post-
apartheid_S...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inequality_in_post-
apartheid_South_Africa)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality)
(Sort by World Bank Giny %, South Africa is first)

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timwaagh
The problem with the argument is that they distinguish between 'informal
because it's the only choice' and 'illegal law evading scumbags slumlords'. So
if you follow that line of thinking, if you enjoy only slight success with
your informal business, you become the scumbag and should be bulldozered.
That's tantamount to reducing township inhabitants to beggars. Given the
history of these areas, it's extremely unfortunate.

~~~
iguy
That seems like an important distinction to make for observation, I mean if
you want to write a paper about what's going on, lumping these things together
may be very misleading.

It's indeed a bit delicate for governments to make different rules based on
size, but many do, there are lots of rules you don't have to follow until you
have 50 employees, etc, in many countries. They don't exactly bulldoze you at
51, but they do incentivize staying under this.

But the size of the gap just sounds just crazy here, "labour laws ... retail
workers must earn at least R3,701 per month" compared to "earning as little as
R400 ... per month" \-- call it a factor 40 between the legal minimum wage,
and the going wage which provides these (useful, even essential) services.
That's a big gap to bridge!

~~~
timwaagh
That's a good point. It would be perfectly reasonable to enforce some labour
rules there. I don't think the article is all bad and some of the things
mentioned definitely can't continue.

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iguy
A super-interesting book on all this is Jonny Steinberg "A Man of Good Hope".
Or at least partly on this, the man in question is a Somali who goes many
places, but one of his jobs is to work in such stores. And his inside
perspective is very different to TFA's fairly academic interview-some-people
one.

