Johannesburg - Woolworths has stirred a hornet’s nest on social media following its decision to actively campaign for International Gay Pride month. It’s a brave decision in a country that is nominally (and constitutionally) very progressive but in reality, still extremely reactionary.
The backlash has provided a window onto the all-too predictable prejudices and deep-seated phobias that lurk - and indeed fester – just under the surface of South African society, cutting across the typical fault lines of class, creed and colour.
We would appear, on social media at least, to be a nation of bigots, homophobes and TERFS (trans-exclusionary radical feminists). But is social media an accurate barometer of real life? If it was, the EFF would have been in government two general elections ago.
Conservatism is a massive force, and not always a benign one. In the US, it is particularly visible in the enduring power of the gun lobby in the face of spiralling massacres of innocents with automatic weapons. Commercially, Bud Lite is an abject exercise in underestimating consumer power with the company ruing its decision to front a recent ad campaign on a transgender model.
Whether Woolworths will face the same brand apocalypse and also have to start culling its executives instead of blocking consumers on Twitter remains to be seen. There is always a cost to corporate activism, which rarely survives shareholder pressure.
But the bigger question is what it says about us. We demand human rights, we glibly speak of tolerance, but yet remain incredibly intolerant of views that don’t accord with our own.
Woolworths greatest revenge will be to stay the course as an activist retailer, while selling goods at a quality and price that its competitors struggle to match. Then it will be up to consumers to have to put their pride in their pocket, as they push their trolleys to the till.
Or not. No one’s forcing them.