The Customers Who Could Not Get to Me to Pay

The shop my father built on trust

My father opened a furniture and appliance shop in a small town in the North West province in the early nineteen eighties, and he built it, more than anything, on a book. A hardcover ledger with a cracked spine, in which he wrote the name of every person who bought a bed or a stove or a kitchen table on terms, and what they owed, and what they had paid, in his careful handwriting. People in our town did not have credit cards and many did not have bank accounts, and the shop worked because my father trusted them and they trusted him, and the book held the trust in the middle. I grew up doing my homework at the counter, watching farmers and domestic workers and teachers and pensioners come in and pay a little off their accounts, in cash, and watching my father make his small neat marks in the book.

When he got too old to run it, I took it over, and I kept the book going, because the book was the business and the business was the town's. But the town had changed, and so had the way people lived, and I started to see a problem that my father never had to face. His customers all lived within walking distance. Mine, increasingly, did not.

When your customers move away but keep their accounts

What happened over the years was that the young people left. They went to work in the mines, or in the cities, in Rustenburg and Klerksdorp and as far as Johannesburg, and they sent money home, and that was the lifeblood of a lot of households in our town. But many of them still had accounts with me, or they were paying off furniture for their parents, or they wanted to buy their mother a new fridge and pay it off over a year. And the way my shop worked, the only way it had ever worked, was that you came in, in person, with cash, and paid at the counter, and I marked the book.

For a customer living three hundred kilometres away, that was a real problem. I had people who were good for the money, who wanted to pay, who were not avoiding me at all, but who simply could not get to my counter more than once or twice a year. So the payments would bunch up. Someone would arrive at Christmas and pay off six months in one go, or ask a cousin who was travelling home to bring the cash, which is a risky thing to ask of anyone. My accounts became lumpy and unpredictable, and lumpy and unpredictable is a hard way to run a small business, because my own suppliers wanted paying on a steady rhythm that my customers could not match.

I tried to solve it the obvious ways and none of them worked well. I gave people my bank details, but many of my customers did not use bank transfers and were nervous of them, and when a payment did come through with just a reference I often could not tell whose it was, so the book and the bank account drifted apart and reconciling them became a monthly headache that ate my evenings.

The pensioner who travelled two hours to pay me

The moment that really made me understand what the problem was costing people came from one of my oldest customers, a woman who had bought from my father before me. She lived now with her daughter in a township outside a city a couple of hours away, and one afternoon she arrived at my counter, out of breath, having taken two taxis to get there, to pay a small amount off a sideboard. Two taxis. The taxi fare was a meaningful fraction of the payment she had come to make. She would not hear of not coming in person, because that was how it had always been done, and I stood there taking her cash and making my mark in the book and feeling, for the first time, genuinely ashamed of my own shop.

Because that was not service. That was me making a loyal old woman spend half a day and a chunk of her pension travelling across a province to hand me money she could have paid in five minutes somewhere near her home, if only I had given her a way to. The book, the thing my father had built the business on, the thing I had kept going out of love and habit, had become a cage. It tied every payment to my physical counter, and my customers no longer lived near my physical counter, and I had been treating that as their problem to solve when it was obviously mine.

Finding a way to let people pay where they already were

I started asking around, talking to other shop owners, to a cousin who runs a small insurance business, trying to understand how other people in my position collected money from customers who were scattered all over the country. What I was looking for, though I did not have the words for it at first, was a way for someone to walk into a shop near wherever they happened to be living and pay their account with me, in cash, over the counter, the way they were comfortable doing, and for that payment to reach me cleanly and be clearly linked to their name.

That led me to understand that there are proper payment solutions built for exactly this, for a country where an enormous number of people still prefer to pay in cash and do it at tills in shops they already visit for their groceries and their airtime. The idea that someone could settle their account with me at a till in a supermarket two provinces away, and that it would land with me properly identified, felt almost too simple after all the years I had spent driving the problem around in my head. I had assumed this was the kind of thing only the big retail chains could do. It is not.

The first month the book and the bank agreed

I brought it in carefully, because my customers are not people you spring change on. I explained it to them one at a time over the counter, and to the ones who had moved away I explained it by phone, that they no longer had to come to me, that they could pay near where they lived. The old woman with the two taxis was one of the first I told, and I will remember the sound she made, a sort of relieved laugh, for a long time. Working with a proper payment provider meant that the payment she made at a till near her daughter's home showed up against her name on my side, cleanly, without me having to guess or chase or reconcile a mystery deposit at the end of the month.

The change in the business was not loud but it was deep. The lumpiness smoothed out. Instead of six months of silence followed by a Christmas scramble, payments came in steadily, from all over, because people paid when they had a little money rather than saving it up for a trip they could rarely make. My own suppliers noticed the difference in how reliably I paid them. And my evenings came back, because the book and the money finally told the same story, and reconciling them stopped being a battle.

My father's trust, carried a little further

I think about my father a lot, running that shop on a ledger and a handshake, and I wonder sometimes what he would make of all this. I think he would understand it better than I expected him to, because the thing at the heart of it is the same thing that was at the heart of his book. It is about trust, and about meeting people where they are. His customers were all within walking distance, so his counter was where they were. Mine are scattered across the country, so I had to find a payment solutions provider that could put a counter wherever they happened to be standing.

The old ledger still sits on my desk, by the way. I could not bring myself to throw it out, and in truth I still like the feel of it. But it no longer carries the whole weight of the business the way it did for my father, and that is a good thing, because the town it was built for does not exist anymore in quite the same shape. The people are still mine. They have just spread out across the map, and I finally stopped asking them to travel back to me, and started letting them pay me from wherever their lives had taken them. My father trusted the people of our town. I like to think I have carried that trust a little further down the road than he ever had to.