Last Word
With less than eight weeks to Christmas and nine weeks to New Year, both the retail and the manufacturing sectors need to be organised for that peculiar Zimbabwean sequence of events, the Festive Season, completely undescribed in our law and labour and economic regulations but entrenched in a swathe of almost unbreakable custom.
For a start, throughout almost all the formal sector and starting with the civil service, is the annual bonus, and even the self-employed taxpayers have reason to join in considering the tax break that the Government gives, the bonus for civil servants, at least up to the upper middle level where a maximum is set, being generally tax free.
This will almost certainly require the usual adjustment in the tax free bonus bracket by Minister of Finance, Economic Development and Investment Promotion Professor Mthuli Ncube when he presents the annual budget this month, but no Government has missed making the adjustment in recent decades and you are old with white hair if you can remember the old days when the bonus was added to ordinary income and so taxed at the higher brackets. Some high earners with full 13th cheques will probably have some taxed at those marginal brackets, but they are few.
The net result is a lot of money pumped into the consumer economy, roughly a full months pay for the formal economy, and that does make a difference. Since the days of hyperinflation the older use for a large chunk of the bonus pool, paying off credit accounts, no longer applies. People cannot buy more until they get the actual cash in their bank accounts, so the previous buy in advance does not work.
Other debts will be cancelled admittedly as people catch up, but that benefits those who hold the debt and means they get their money without having to threaten those who owe them and have fallen behind so there is a substantial economic advance.
A lot of people also set aside cash for school fees and school uniforms and supplies, but that still leaves a large lump of extra money.
The retail and service sectors, and this includes the informal sector so they are not left out from “bonus time” will be expecting to get a healthy slice of that extra money, and they will.
The tricky question for retailers is what will those with bonus money, and especially the young who have no school fees and the later middle aged, whose children have grown up, be spending their money on.
While there might be some stashing of US dollars for a rainy day few with a pile of extra ZiG are going to tuck those away considering their experiences over the past two and half decades, or even three decades.
A bit of luxury spending will occur, or at least semi-luxury spending, or at least non-essential spending. so more money will be spent on drink and clothes and toys. But it is also likely that most households will be looking at building up assets.
We can expect, for example, more money spent on solar panels and modern battery installations, or at least on solar and rechargeable lamps if the money does not extend to panels.
Household appliances are likely to be of interest, especially when ZiG payments are possible or the cheaper informal sector US dollar prices, since credit only applies to formal sector US dollar purchases.
Some extra supermarket grocery purchases are likely, and a bit more variety in food, both for visits to rural cousins or parents or other relatives and the odd party, but generally these are stocking up.
Volumes do rise though and here it is important that the manufacturing sector stays on board.
While retailers tend to go flat out until Christmas, and even open on Christmas Day, and stay ready during the next week to New Year, manufacturers by those almost inflexible customs tend to join lawyers and others in breaking for the “festive season” and going into their annual shutdown.
Part of this was to minimise staff costs. If the bulk of the workforce can take their annual leave together then there is no need for that extra 10 percent payroll and a leave roster. Factories can be a bit like schools and everyone goes on vacation simultaneously. And by custom this is the Christmas-New Year period.
Of course some have to stay on a duty roster, the security staff and the maintenance and factory engineering staff for a start.
This is their one major opportunity to get into the machinery for a proper bout of maintenance and reconditioning and those departments usually have to have a normal leave roster, with 8,33 percent of staff on leave at any one time. In fact the “festive season” is usually barred for them to take leave, since the plant engineering manager needs the full team on duty.
The danger that arises is that this shut down starts at least during the busiest time of the year as far as retail sales go, so it is important that stocks are built up.
As more manufacturing is done locally this need to create advance stocks will become greater. In many ways an annual shutdown might need to be at a different time of the year.
Many European countries, and parts of the US and Canada, see August as a more obvious time for shutdowns or diminished staffing levels, when so many Europeans and Americans are on summer holiday leave, so demand is often lower.
Part of the Zimbabwean pressure for the “festive season” comes from managerial staff, who often like to join their friends who also take this time of year off.
Company parties for clients are often in the fortnight before Christmas for example, although that would be odd in a pure Catholic country, where until just over a century ago Advent had some fasting requirements and even when these were changed, there was still that tendency to see the three to four weeks before Christmas, the time depending on the actual day of the week of Christmas, being a time of preparation, not festivities.
The Catholic calendar has the 12 days of Christmas starting on Christmas Day, with Epiphany now added on and then January up to Candlemas, or February 2 even when Easter and so Lent would be early, and usually some extra festive time during Mardi Gras.
This admittedly was built round a northern hemisphere farming winter, with the crops in and the winter slaughtering done just before Christmas, so there was plenty of food.
Some of it might be odd in the pure Calvinist countries, since Calvin and so his theological followers totally reject Christmas as a pagan and papist feast, but those few countries tend to put all the attention on New Year.
But you still had Oliver Cromwell in Britain after he had seized power after the second civil war banning Christmas, and using armed force to ensure everyone worked on December 25, and obeyed his ordered fasting.
So there is no special reason why mid-December to mid-January should be seen as the time when businesses can behave slightly oddly.
The only national industrial council that does recognise the festive season is the construction industry, where there is a compulsory break, but here they are backed by the logic that this used to be the wettest time of the year and so it was difficult to build.
Some of the festive season social norms date from the day when many factory workers were still migrant labourers, living in the towns apart from their families, and needed to go home for a period each year and this was chosen.
That is several decades ago now, and while there are still new urbanites all the time, a large majority of the urban population is now fully urbanised, and is down to cousins, or second cousins or third cousins in their “district of origin” regardless of the last two digits on their national identity number after the check letter.
