Spur, people with a taste for strife – we owe that line to Rebecca Davis and the Daily Maverick.

So perhaps it’s worth touching on how we got to the point where Spur Corporation’s CEO Pierre van Tonder is now embarking on a nationwide tour to clean up a pretty serious mess.

It all started with THAT video a few months back, and the subsequent video that showed how the now infamous confrontation had come to be (HERE).

It appears the man in the video, Nico Viljoen, has all but disappeared off the radar, and Spur were quick to condemn his actions.

That’s all well and good, but then a ‘Boycott/Boikot SPUR Steak Ranches’ group popped up on Facebook (HERE) and it became about business and the bottom line.

This leads us to that nationwide tour, with this below via Fin24:

…the company said the tour would be done in a bid to “gain a greater understanding of their customers and franchisees”.

“Over the past few months, we have realised that we have not been listening to our customers,” Van Tonder [below] said…

He said the corporation accepted and recognised the sentiments of both the public and its franchisees with regards to the way they had handled the situation “overall”.

“We hereby unconditionally apologise to any person or community who has taken exception to our actions and will ensure a fair hearing is conducted prior to judgements being made in future,” he said.

In the wake of the incident, Spur had convened a panel to analyse the best way forward, but that has now been binned as well.

HuffPost SA with more:

Spur has shelved the panel after pressure from the Solidarity Movement, the reactionary Afrikaner rights organisation, and an organised boycott which saw some Spur franchises lose up to 40% of their turnover. Even though Solidarity denies it organised the boycotts, its leaders fanned it by saying Spur’s reaction to the incident – it banned Viljoen and instituted the panel – shows it doesn’t want Afrikaner customers…

Dirk Hermann, Solidarity’s chief executive, [also] fanned the flames of the boycott by using any and every Afrikaans platform he was offered to explain why “he’s lost a taste for Spur”. And notwithstanding the shameless manner in which Solidarity tried to solicit advertisements for its members’ magazine “in order to address the crisis the company finds itself in”…

Hermann [above] says they want to find a solution to the situation because it is Spur franchise holders and their employees who bear the brunt of the public’s reaction. But what he’s not saying is that it’s his organisation’s bullying that’s harming franchise holders…

When Viljoen was banned from Spur after telling a woman that he was going to give her a “poesklap”, Hermann and Solidarity once again fanned a boycott and labelled it as an attack on Afrikaans and Afrikaners, which it clearly is not.

By equating the banning of one man behaving in a barbaric, despicable and abhorrent manner to an assault on a whole group is dishonest and devious…

[Spur have] chosen the side of a man, supported by an Afrikaner pressure group, who tells black women he will give them a “c*nt slap”.

Every company has values. Spur’s values are now publicly known.

How frail are your feelings, snowflake South Africans boycotting Spur? A man screams in a woman’s face, threatening her with violence in a country shamed by our treatment of women, and you take that as a rallying cry to boycott a chain of restaurants?

There are some fights worth fighting, and the sooner Solidarity figures out which ones those are the better it is for every South African.

And Spur, sort yourself out – this is really not a very good look.

[sources:fin24&huffpostsa]