[imagesource:dailymaverick]

When an altercation broke out in a Johannesburg Spur outlet in March 2017, the restaurant chain could never expect to still be dealing with the backlash more than two years later.

At first, Spur’s response to the video going viral came under fire from those who felt that the black woman involved hadn’t been shown enough support.

When Spur subsequently offered an apology to the woman, and banned the white man involved, a ‘white boycott’ began, with a number of Facebook groups saying that Spur was racist against white people.

By the way, the man involved in the viral video has a very murky past, which you can read about here.

The story of the backlash against Spur hasn’t gone away. Over the weekend, Kimon de Greef and Norimitsu Onishi, writing for the New York Times, revisited the topic.

They headed to Strand, just outside of Cape Town, to kick this one off:

“I’ll never set foot inside that place again,” said Keith van Eeden, who lives in Strand and was a loyal Spur customer for more than three decades, religiously taking his three children there on their birthdays.

“Spur is only for blacks now,” Mr. van Eeden added. “They don’t want the whites.”

….The Spur boycott resonated the most among white, working-class Afrikaners like Mr. van Eeden who, while living in a country where whites still disproportionately control the economy, feel resentful about having lost out in the democratic South Africa.

Mr. van Eeden, who runs a rubble removal service in Strand, a stronghold of Afrikaners, said that when apartheid ended, he “wasn’t very happy about it.”

He no longer believes that South Africa is a country for people like him. “If we had money,” he said, “we’d have got out.”

Let’s move on from van Eeden (unhappy when Apartheid ended? Well…) and focus on the boycott as a whole, which they report has been mightily effective:

Within six months of the boycott, Spur’s nationwide sales dropped by more than 9 percent. That overall dip concealed even deeper losses at the chain’s restaurants in predominantly white areas.

“Nobody in South Africa thought a boycott could be this effective,” said Johan Pienaar, a brand expert, who consulted with Spur on how to manage the protest but no longer works on the chain’s behalf. Spur, he added, was “suddenly being boycotted by the very people they’ve been cultivating as customers for years.”

Arthur Peace, whose family owned two Spur franchises in the predominantly white suburbs north of Cape Town, said business was devastated by the boycott. He had to sell one of the restaurants.

“You go from being O.K. into the red zone within a month,” he said. Mr. Peace recalled regular customers telling him, “‘We love you guys, but we’re just not supporting the brand.’”

Arthur’s story is backed up by the company’s chief operating officer, Mark Farrelly, who said during a 2017 interview that they were facing a “rabid right-wing backlash.”

It seems that things may have cooled a little, with sales in many parts of the country recovering, but Arthur says there are still eight families staying away from his sole remaining outlet.

In response to the New York Times story, and after being approached by TimesLIVE, Spur spokesperson Moshe Apleni was pretty tight-lipped:

“We told The New York Times that we would not comment, but they went ahead with the story. From our side, the story is old and we will not entertain it,” he said.

The Facebook group ‘Boycott Spur Steak Ranches‘, which has just over 2 500 members, is still live, although it hasn’t posted since October 2017.

If you look at Spur Corporation Limited’s share price over the past five years, there has been a marked decline:

They’re not the only company on the JSE that has suffered, of course, and these are tough times for restaurants, beloved or otherwise, right across South Africa.

Still, having people boycotting outlets doesn’t exactly make matters any easier.

[sources:nytimes&timeslive]