The festive season is a time where many of working class people head back home to their loved ones. They use the time to ‘jol’ and have as much fun as possible and come home broke. While these people spend their bonuses or savings money on food, clothes presents and of course booze, there has to be people behind the counter to help them spend their cash by ensuring that they are good to buy!

While they are happily doing their Christmas shopping people like Priscilla Dlamini, who is a supervisor at Charlie’s Spar, make sure that the shelves are always packed with stuff for people to spend their money on and, that for her, means working longer hours. However the Festive season is a great time for people like her to make as much money as possible but that it is through hard work, working longer hours.

For twenty-four years Priscilla has been working for Charlie’s Spar and the festive season is nothing more than just the time to get on with the supervising work at the fruit and vegetable department and she loves every moment of it. She prefers to spend most of her hours doing her work rather than sit at home most of time. “I get bored even when I am on leave I prefer working.”
Although like most retail shops, Spar is closed on Christmas Day. Priscilla has to sacrifice all other days-like December 26 if you prefer not to work on January! She says many people prefer the New Year’s holiday especially young people. She says many of her colleagues negotiate with each other as to which holiday they agree to work on. She describes her working environment as pleasant and homely.

Priscilla is a doer herself, she might be a supervisor but she says she leads by example because she does not believe that ‘you have to be hard on a person for not doing their work while you also cannot do it.’ “I feel satisfied doing the job myself, I do not wait for my staff to do everything, I am hands on too,” she said. Her department is always packed with fruits and vegetable as she makes sure that she never leaves without making sure that at least if not all of her stock has been sold out.

“This is why I never leave incomplete because I know no one will do my work. We all have work to do, and no one will leave their job to complete mine.” She indicated her department is man dominated she said that is because “it is easier to work with men than women because men do not take issues personally” men do not take things personal unlike women that it why she finds it easier to work with them.