An Inquiry into the Challenges Faced by Supermarkets during the 2020 Alert Level 5 Lockdown in Cape Town, South Africa

The outbreak and spread of the novel coronavirus have affected and taken the lives of many and have crippled the global economy. This paper seeks to explore and investigate the challenges that supermarkets faced while operating under a total lockdown and a shutdown of other key operational sectors with controlled customer movement. Using purposive sampling, telephone interviews with 10 supermarket managers were conducted. A qualitative thematic content analysis was employed to develop a preliminary coding scheme. Emerging analytic patterns generated 3 major themes with subthemes. The results demonstrated that supermarkets faced individual challenges, group challenges, and organizational challenges. These challenges manifested as decreasing revenue, lack of preparedness, slow response, fear, staff shortages, staff loss, unexpected expenses, misinformation, disinformation, stock shortages, staff and customer negligence among other things. The results also showed that the real response to most challenges came after and not during the hard lockdown. The researcher recommended psychopathological solutions for individual and group challenges since there are subjective and cognitive in nature. A strong support system for organizational challenges to develop a resilient and responsive backup system. The paper has been summarised with significant highlights including future research scope for developing a more robust pandemic-oriented response system.