This is the tale of a scatter cushion. A home-grown, hand-made scatter cushion. Lovingly crafted and sold for a pittance, I am sure, to a retailer at a little trading station in Hazyview (that shall remain nameless), where it was priced at a whopping R698.
I love nothing more than browsing through curio shops in the farthest corners of South Africa. But it’s getting harder to find arts and crafts that do not break my budget and leave me assured that they have been purchased fairly from the hands that made them.
Unfortunately, ethics are lacking in a growing number of craft shops on the routes frequented by international tourists. Traders seem to think that all overseas visitors are loaded and easily fooled. And all of this adds up to an insidious trend in the craft trade — overpricing.
Unlike those found in the upmarket malls of Jo’burg, the craft shop in Hazyview was a boring, average establishment selling wares not very different from the kind you’d find at the Hartbeespoort dam flea market. Except for the fact that at the flea market you can haggle your way to a fair price.
On asking, in shock, whether the wrong price had been attached to the said scatter cushion, I was told politely but firmly that it was, in fact, correct. There was no answer to my equally polite, but firm, enquiry as to how many scatter cushions were actually sold for this price.
Grasping the cushion, I stepped outside the shop on to the stoep and asked a young entrepreneur selling carvings whether he knew who made such cushions. He replied that he knew of several local women in the full-time business of making cushion covers, table cloths and other textile-related goods.
The young man confirmed that the cushion cover was made of the same all-natural material woven by local women, which was sold to the local craft shops for onward trade. Then I asked him the burning question: Did he have any idea how much the women were paid for their cushion covers? He consulted with a colleague nearby before answering that it cost just R80 for one.
I presume the owner of this particular shop had bought his cushion covers locally, stuffed them with run-of-the-mill cushion fillers (about R50 for a medium-sized, plump cushion) and slapped on a ridiculously high mark-up.
Back inside the shop, I recounted my conversation with the young entrepreneur to the manager. “No madam, this is not [of] the same quality as the locally produced fabric,” he told me. “It is specially imported.”
From where? I asked. “Africa,” he replied. All attempts to carry the questioning further were interrupted by the arrival of a coach-load of German tourists who entered the shop to browse. Several had calculators handy and began converting rands to euros. Items were handled, prices checked, calculations made and items returned to the shelves. One man raised his eyebrows at me and said, “Very expensive,” with a wan smile.
The tourists left almost as quickly as they had arrived — without having bought a thing. So much for the huge mark-ups, I thought, heading for the door. Outside, I saw the young entrepreneur selling an attractive carving of a giraffe to a satisfied-looking tourist.
Investigation of other shops at the trading centre rendered similar results, with carvings, crafts and furniture, for the most part, all priced beyond the realm of the average tourist — local or international.
I am all for shops selling goods made locally or elsewhere in Africa — if the people who made them are getting their fair share of the profits and if the prices being charged are within reason for both the local and international markets. Why should visitors be ripped off? Because they earn more? Because they’re foreign? Because they don’t know any better?
The craft trade is an integral part of tourism in South Africa. It needs nurturing and support. Ripping off tourists can only diminish support for the arts and crafts sector.
Which craft shop is going to make more money — the one that sells fairly priced and fairly acquired products on a regular basis to both local and overseas tourists, or the one that sells one scatter cushion it bought for R80 and stuffed for a further R50 for R698 to someone from afar (with more money than sense) every six months?
I spotted an almost identical scatter cushion last week in Pretoria, at curio stalls outside the Union Buildings. The price? Only R70 each. I asked the stallholder who her supplier was. “My sister makes them,” she replied. I bought four and ordered a further eight.