Abstract:
COVID-19 has caused substantial impacts on businesses of all size across different economies. However, the e-grocery industry has experienced an unprecedented resurgence in demand caused by panic buying that strained the entire logistics elements from inventory, storage, unitization and packaging, transportation, to communication. Recent preliminary reports suggest that, compared to major e-grocery retailers, the strain is expected to shutter many small businesses. However, the substantial implications of the impacts on small businesses remain unknown. In South Africa, a group of urban, township, and rural small emerging e-grocery retailers make use of competitors’ and third-parties’ assets to stock, pick, store, and transport e-groceries, activities which are coordinated using mobile applications. This involves the use of competitors’ grocery assets, such as stock and infrastructure (stores), to advance access into the e-grocery industry. This chapter qualitatively explores the impacts of COVID-19 on urban, township, and rural small e-grocery retailers whose logistics processes/ elements and operations rely on competitors’ resources and third-party providers. The objective of the chapter is to discover how COVID-19 has re-aligned the logistics elements of eight small e-grocery retailers in the urban, township and rural areas of South Africa. Further, which parts of the logistics elements, if any, have been redefined, and how COVID-19 has impacted their operations, considering that most of their target markets in South Africa were reported to be negatively impacted by redundancy and unemployment. The findings provide evidence of how pandemics such as COVID-19 impact on small e-grocery commerce and add to current understanding of how pandemics create and disrupt e-grocery innovations.
