Durban - A year after rioting and looting shook KwaZulu-Natal, it’s business as usual for a small grocery outlet, called Looters, in a Durban North side road.
“When trying to come up with a name four-and-a-half years ago, I wanted people to get the feeling that they had got what they bought for nothing, like they looted. Got it for a steal,” said owner Luan Crawford.
She started her first Looters outlet in Cape Town in 2017 and now has two in that city, the Durban branch having opened in 2020.
“During the looting, a lot of people thought it was so unfortunate. But people all over the world were googling ‘looters in Durban’. It was great advertising.”
Crawford’s brother, Steve Woods, who runs the Durban outlet, managed to keep it going during the difficult week, closing for only one day.
“Customers were queueing for a kilometre,” Crawford said, speaking from Cape Town.
She said Woods received calls from people desperate for groceries.
“They said, ‘please help’, and he did. They even asked – where we were getting our stuff? From the looters?”
That, of course, she said was not the case at all.
She put the spike in business down to “God having a sense of humour”.
“You always ask to be put on the map.”
It just happened in a way she least expected it.
During the notorious week, Crawford’s two Cape Town Looters outlets saw the normal amount of social media activity while the Durban shop left them in the dust.
The Independent on Saturday