Raymond Ackerman, the South African retail tycoon and the founder of Pick n Pay has died. Picture: Supplied
Pick n Pay founder Raymond Ackerman has died at 92.
He leaves his wife, Wendy, children Gareth, Kathy, Suzanne and Jonathan, his 12 grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.
Ackerman came from a retailing family with his father, having founded Ackermans after World War I.
He founded Pick n Pay in 1967 along with Wendy after buying four stores in Cape Town.
From the outset, he lived by the values that the customer was queen.
These values guided the business for over 56 years, and today the Pick n Pay Group serves millions of customers in more than 2 000 stores across South Africa and seven other African countries.
By the end of the 1970s, he was active in the newly-established Urban Foundation, becoming a prominent champion of equal opportunity policies and merit-based salaries and wages, and increasingly critical of government’s homelands policy, the Group Areas Act and Job Reservation.
He was also critical of sanctions, in the belief that they destroyed jobs and deepened poverty.
In 2004, Ackerman established the Raymond Ackerman Academy for Entrepreneurial Development in partnership with UCT, which was later joined by the University of Johannesburg.
Well over 1 000 graduates have come through the Academy through the combined programme in Cape Town and Joburg.
The academy has produced hundreds of new business owners, many of them offering employment to others, while well over 400 of its graduates are now gainfully employed.
The programme has now been centralised in Joburg and has expanded to an online offering accessible to students across the continent.
In 2009, he was the founder of the Raymond Ackerman Golf Academy at the Clovelly Country Club, where aside from teaching the discipline and techniques of golf, the youth are provided with access to emotional support and life skills as well as school and homework assistance.
By the time Ackerman finally retired and handed the chairman’s reins to son Gareth, Pick n Pay was operating 20 hypermarkets and 402 supermarkets across South Africa, while group turnover stood at almost R50 billion.
Cape Times