Business & Enterprise
Landmark
Raymond Ackerman
1931 – 2023
Built Pick n Pay from four Cape Town shops
Landmark is level 2 of 4 in the South Africa Hall of Fame: a first that opened a door, or the pre-eminent figure of their generation in this country. See how the levels work.
Why they are here
Sacked from his father's old company, he bought four small Cape Town shops and turned them into one of the largest retailers in Africa — and used the position to argue publicly against apartheid economics.
Raymond Ackerman was running the Checkers chain when the company's owners dismissed him in 1966. With his severance and borrowed money he bought four small supermarkets in Cape Town trading as Pick n Pay.
He built them into a chain of hundreds of stores across southern Africa on a doctrine he called consumer sovereignty — that the shopper, not the manufacturer or the government, should set the price. That brought him into direct and repeated conflict with the state: he fought the fixed bread price, broke the ban on retailers selling petrol, and took on the producer cartels, and was attacked in parliament for it.
He also broke apartheid's commercial rules before he had to. Pick n Pay desegregated its shop floors, lifts and staff facilities, promoted Black managers, recognised unions and funded schooling and training for its workers at a point when doing any of it invited official trouble, and he said publicly and repeatedly that the system was both wrong and economically stupid. He died in 2023.
He built them into a chain of hundreds of stores across southern Africa on a doctrine he called consumer sovereignty — that the shopper, not the manufacturer or the government, should set the price. That brought him into direct and repeated conflict with the state: he fought the fixed bread price, broke the ban on retailers selling petrol, and took on the producer cartels, and was attacked in parliament for it.
He also broke apartheid's commercial rules before he had to. Pick n Pay desegregated its shop floors, lifts and staff facilities, promoted Black managers, recognised unions and funded schooling and training for its workers at a point when doing any of it invited official trouble, and he said publicly and repeatedly that the system was both wrong and economically stupid. He died in 2023.
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