This article was first published in the Financial Mail on 04 December 2025.
Pick n Pay CEO Sean Summers’s opinion piece in the Daily Maverick last month calling for the banning of advertising for online gambling added to the attention focused by several recent reports on the explosive growth in gambling in South Africa in the past five years.
Famous Brands has raised similar concerns. Both Summers and Famous Brands highlight the impact that the surge in online gambling in particular is having on disposable income, and therefore on their businesses’ revenues, as consumer spending on groceries and eating out declines as a result.
The Old Mutual Savings & Investment Monitor 2025 shows that 52% of working South Africans gamble and that 40% report gambling frequently to help cover expenses or debt. Most gambling takes place via apps and websites. Among mid- and lower-income earners, the primary driver of gambling is to make extra money to top up income.
A 2025 report on online betting in South Africa by data company and credit bureau Experian and financial services platform Vault22 found that young people are gambling on average 41% of their income. Wealthy people, while betting greater absolute amounts, limit their exposure to an average of 10% of their gross income. Low- and middle-income groups are spending more on gambling than on groceries — likely a factor in Summers’s concern.
Similarly, another report by infoQuest found that only 37% of gamblers say they use extra funds to gamble — 63% use money that should be allocated to spending on essentials, savings and other financial commitments.
What I find most interesting about this sudden surge of elite concern about gambling is how it appears to treat the impact of gambling as an isolated problem that has emerged from nowhere, instead of an entirely foreseeable outcome of the dynamics of our highly unequal society. And predictably, there is no recognition by big corporates of the role they themselves play in driving online gambling demand.
In fact, the gambling crisis in South Africa and its knock-on effect on the financial results of giant corporations is a perfect example of how inequality is a systemic risk that affects the financial system and the macroeconomy. This is despite its treatment by most portfolio managers as a “nonfinancial” issue.
You can be sure that the people spending less money on groceries because of gambling are not the wealthy gamblers but low-income earners who gamble in the desperate hope that they’ll either win enough to cover this month’s expenses or that a big win will change their lives, or both.
A direct contributor to that compulsion is the wages paid to lower-income workers. Contrary to what you’ll hear from every corporate leader in this country, it is not “just” unemployment that drives our high levels of inequality. Labour market inequality — in other words, wage gaps — still mirrors the apartheid labour system and is a key driver of overall socioeconomic inequality. While the conventional belief holds that minimising labour costs is a management imperative, paying employees poverty wages contributes to systemic economic and social risks. Pick n Pay is now experiencing the direct results of this.
The Living Wage South Africa Network defines a living wage as “the remuneration required for an individual and their family to attain a frugal but dignified standard of living”. It finds that “individuals in low-income work often cannot survive without additional loans to meet their needs” and recommends paying a monthly minimum net income of R12,000-R15,000 for a 40-hour working week.
Pick n Pay does not publicly disclose the wages paid to its lower-tier employees, but in a post-AGM engagement with Just Share it confirmed that its lowest-paid workers earn the minimum wage of R28.79 per hour, or R4,990 per month for a 40-hour workweek.
This is lower even than what the Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice & Dignity Group estimated (as at July 2025) as necessary per person per month to cover the basic necessities of food, electricity, transport and other essential services: R6,778.
The people who are spending less on groceries because they are spending more on online gambling logically include the people employed by companies such as Pick n Pay. They earn wages that trap them in poverty, rendering them unable to escape the desperate struggle to make ends meet, let alone invest in their or their children’s futures.
Even though these companies could not operate without these workers and could not generate the profits that have made their executives multimillionaires, many of their employees are not accorded a wage that would give them a dignified standard of living.
No wonder they turn to the purple-and-gold promises of the online betting industry.
Before the business elite attack gambling for the damage it does to our society, they would do well to reflect on the plank in their own eyes when it comes to the wages paid to low-income workers.
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