Johannesburg - ONE-half of the dynamic duo that has seen the growth of a multimillion-rand business that has garnered seven honorary doctorates and over 50 business awards, Raymond Ackerman, has died.
Ackerman, founder of retail giant Pick n Pay, reportedly died at age 92.
Born in Cape Town in 1931, he went to the Diocesan College (Bishops) and furthered his studies at UCT, where he developed the social conscience that was to characterise his illustrious career.
At the age of 20, he joined Ackermans, founded by his father after World War I, as a trainee manager in 1951, until it was purchased by Greatermans, where, upon joining the Johannesburg group, he ended up persuading the company to invest in modern supermarkets.
In 1955, he was put in charge of launching the Checkers supermarkets and made a resounding success of the venture, so much so that by 1966, at the age of 35, he was the managing director of at least 85 Checkers stores.
When Ackerman was fired by the Greatermans Group for wanting to lower prices for customers in 1966, he used his two weeks’ severance pay, a bank loan, a modest inheritance, and shares purchased by friends to purchase four small stores in Cape Town trading under the name Pick n Pay for R620 000.
It was at this point that he and his wife Wendy kicked off their entrepreneurial journey in 1967, and by September 1968, Pick n Pay went public and was listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.
Since then, they have seen the business grow over the past 56 years to 2 000 stores across South Africa, Namibia, Zambia, Botswana, Lesotho, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and even eSwatini.
Ackerman’s business philosophy was underpinned by the likes of Bernardo Trujillo, a Colombian-born American marketing executive, who said a successful business was born on the foundation of the “four legs of the table”: administration, merchandise, promotions / social responsibility and people.
Through the years, the retail giant was known for his battles against price regulations, which forced people to pay more than they should for groceries, but he took it a step further by challenging the government against the prohibition of a petrol coupon scheme in 1986.
Pick n Pay went toe-to-toe with the government more than 26 times to ensure petrol price cutting and never lost.
Remaining true to Trujillo’s teachings, Ackerman never shied away from putting people first; in the 1960s, he remained determined to promote all employees to managerial positions, in defiance of apartheid laws forbidding it.
He appointed Pick n Pay’s first black manager in his Rondebosch store the year after the company was listed.
He took things a step further by the end of the 1970s by becoming active in the newly-established Urban Foundation, championing equal opportunity policies and merit-based salaries and wages, and becoming increasingly critical of the then government’s apartheid laws, including the homelands policy, Group Areas Act, and job reservation.
In 1978, Ackerman scored a singular personal victory when he persuaded then-Prime Minister John Vorster to introduce 99-year leasehold rights for black African employees in urban areas.
As a consequence, Pick n Pay was able to introduce an assisted company housing scheme for its growing number of black employees. This was the same year Ackerman persuaded Vorster to allow the Clovelly Golf Club, also founded by his father in the 1920s, to become South Africa’s first non-racial golf club.
In 1989, alongside a group of businessmen, he met newly appointed President FW de Klerk at Pick n Pay’s headquarters in Cape Town, calling for the release of Nelson Mandela and the scrapping of the apartheid legislation.
Not only was Ackerman a businessman and philanthropist, his influence went over and above that as he became the driving force behind the bid to bring the 2004 Olympic Games to Cape Town.
In 2004, he established the Raymond Ackerman Academy for Entrepreneurial Development in partnership with UCT, which was later joined by the University of Johannesburg.
He and his wife retired from the board of Pick n Pay Stores Limited in 2010 and became honorary life presidents; however, he maintained an active interest in the business and his philanthropic projects.
By the time he left, Pick n Pay was operating 20 hypermarkets and 402 supermarkets across South Africa alone, with a business value of over R50 billion.
The first award he received, in 1965, was that of One of the Four Outstanding Young South Africans, and through the years, he and the business received many more awards.
The Star