Freedom Supermarket opens its doors to shoppers
ALEXANDRA – The 200 staff compliment never lost their jobs as most of them were absorbed in the reconstruction, says Obel.
Good news for the community of Alexandra is that their favourite discount store, Freedom Supermarket will open its doors once more for shoppers on November 15.
This was disclosed by Nick Obel, the spokesperson for Freedom Corner and Freedom Supermarket. He said the rebuilding work on the store was 95% complete and the shop had been earmarked to reopen on November 1 but because of the strike by the metalworkers union, the date had to be moved to November 15.
“The strike, which ended today [October 19], threw a spanner into the works and we had to shift the date of opening. We are now giving it two weeks to allow for the delivery of the outstanding shelves for the stores, and once that is done, the stores can safely open on the proposed date,” Obel said.
Obel added out of their 200 staff complement, none of them had lost their jobs. “In our quest to protect our workers’ jobs and reassure them that we are together in this, we even went the extra-mile to hire some of them in the reconstruction work.”
Freedom Corner and Freedom Supermarket are affiliates of the Greater Alexandra Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and Obel paid tribute to the chamber and its president Mpho Motsumi for his great work which has taken the stores to where they are today, on the brink of reopening.
The stores were razed to the ground as looters not only broke into them but set them alight once they had stolen most of the stock. The stores were fully insured under Sasrea, Obel said.
In just two weeks of the looting mayhem, Obel said Sasrea was hit with a claims bill of R20 billion but ‘we were lucky that we managed to get paid gradual amounts that helped us to rebuild, though we had to find other sources of funds to supplement the payouts’.
