Small Businesses Deserve Fairness – Serious Concerns Regarding Pick n Pay Haffy Centre

I am extremely disappointed by our experience with **Pick n Pay at Haffy Centre, Verulam**, and even more disappointed by how difficult it has been to get this matter escalated to someone at a regional or senior management level.

Our small business, **The Water Spot**, has been operating at Haffy Centre for almost four years. We are a specialist water business, and purified and alkaline water is not simply an additional product on our shelves — **it is our core business and our livelihood**.

We have invested years into specialised purification equipment, operating costs, rent, water, electricity, staff and building a loyal customer base.

Pick n Pay, the anchor tenant in the same centre, has now introduced a dedicated water refill system and is selling water, including water marketed as alkaline water, in direct competition with our specialist business.

We fully understand normal competition. We have never expected Pick n Pay to stop selling ordinary bottled water. What is deeply concerning to us is a major anchor retailer introducing a dedicated offering that substantially overlaps with the core trade of a small specialist business already operating within the same centre.

A small independent business simply does not have the purchasing power, infrastructure, customer volumes or economies of scale of a major supermarket operation. When an anchor tenant enters the same specialist category and is able to sell at significantly lower prices, the consequences for the smaller business can be devastating.

What makes this even more concerning is that **we understand that other independent tenants at Haffy Centre have experienced similar concerns after Pick n Pay introduced products or offerings overlapping with their established trades**. Those individual businesses should, of course, speak for themselves about their experiences, but we believe the situation deserves proper investigation.

We are not asking for special treatment. We are asking for **fairness, accountability and meaningful engagement**.

What has made this experience even more frustrating is our difficulty in obtaining contact with an appropriate **Pick n Pay regional or senior manager** who can properly address the matter. For an organisation of this size, a small business owner with a serious commercial concern involving a Pick n Pay-branded anchor store should be able to have that concern escalated beyond ordinary store-level customer service.

Small businesses create jobs, support families, pay rent and contribute to the very shopping centres in which major retailers operate. We should not have to feel powerless simply because the business we are raising concerns about is substantially larger than ours.

We are publicly asking **Pick n Pay Head Office and the appropriate KwaZulu-Natal regional management** to engage with us, investigate what is happening at Haffy Centre and provide us with a senior point of contact who has the authority to address this matter.

We are ready to provide the relevant information and evidence and would genuinely prefer to resolve this constructively.

**The Water Spot** Haffy Centre, Verulam