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Where will it end?I have a naive buddy called Fred, who sees South Africa’s traffic light trading as something really positive.
We were driving through Johannesburg’s northern suburbs when he asked me to give him a few minutes to pick up a few purchases at, as he put it, “the next stopping centre”.
“You mean ‘shopping centre’,” I said, delighted that his pre-golf whisky had addled the speech centre of his brain to the extent that he was not only cocking up his p’s and q’s, but I could up the stakes for the afternoon’s golf on the basis that alcohol and Fred’s short game had a long history of not mixing.
“No,” he said, “I don’t mean shopping centre, I mean stopping centre – the greatest retail development since sliced bread.”
The mystery unravelled at the next set of robots. Fred bought himself 80 plastic garbage bags, a dozen coat hangers, three tubes of superglue for the price of one and a huge bouquet of flowers for his wife.
And all without getting out of the car or having to park it.
Everything happened with such incredible efficiency that the fellow in the puce sports car behind us didn’t have to lean on his hooter because Fred’s shopping, or rather, stopping expedition all happened between the robots turning red and then going green again.
The fact that all the petals had fallen off his bunch of flowers by the time we’d finished 18 holes didn’t deter Fred one bit.
He insisted that his wife would appreciate the gesture anyway, on top of which the stems actually looked quite pretty in a Jurassic Park-ish sort of way.
Fred waxed lyrical about the future of South Africa’s “stopping centres”. He pointed out a street corner entrepreneur welding an exhaust pipe onto a minibus taxi.
“Now look at that for convenience,” he enthused. “I’ll bet he fixes that a lot faster and cheaper than those places that try and sell you a whole new exhaust system and a new set of shock absorbers and a tow bar.
“And who knows, in a few years’ time, you’ll be able to get a full lubrication service and maybe even have your head skimmed just by pulling off at a stop street.”
I tried to involve myself in his enthusiasm by suggesting that before long, we may even be able to pick up a brand new Rolls Royce Silver something-or-other from the pavement on the corner of Rivonia Road and Maud Street.
Fred gave me the same look he usually saved for when I asked him to give me a two-metre downhill putt.
“Just think, in a few years’ time, there won’t be anything you can’t buy from a street corner without leaving your car. You’ll be able to have a haircut, buy mutual funds, get petrol on the cheap and pick up a loaf of bread and a litre of milk with your newspaper.
“These guys will soon catch on to the whole credit card lark, so you won’t need money any more. Isn’t it great?”
Fred sat back smugly.
“What I really like about it”, I said in an effort to de-smug him, “is that it will save us a fortune in rates and taxes.”
Fred gave me that look he reserved for an opponent who insisted he had not only found his golf ball in the deep rough, but that it was sitting up well enough to have a full go at it with a three wood.
“What do you mean?” he asked through narrowed teeth and even narrower eyes.
“Well”, I said, “if this stopping centre business starts getting really big, surely no one will deny municipalities the right to charge rental on what is, after all, their own property and obviously SARS would have to have its cut?”
Fred looked decidedly bleak. His 10-metre putt on the 15th and rather brilliant bunker shot on the 12th were both completely forgotten.
“I suppose,” he said, morosely getting the message, “that if stopping centres start really catching on, there will be such congestion at the stop streets that someone will have to put up a parking garage.”
“Not to mention”, I added, “the fact that the bigger they get, the more vulnerable they’ll be, so they’ll have to put up enclosures to stop people nicking their inventory and perhaps put up a roof to stop it all getting ruined when it rains.”
“And sooner or later they’ll just find it a lot more convenient just to move into a shopping centre,” he admitted grudgingly.
Fred looked pensive. That sort of I-can’t-believe-I-missed-that-little-putt look.
I took pity. “Come on Fred”, I said, “I’ll buy you a drink. I know this great pub – it’s part of a chain owned by a fellow who used to flog Cokes and Castles at those crossroads just this side of Sun City.” ?
Chris Moerdyk
