The Foschini Group (TFG), one of South Africa’s largest fashion retailers, is planning to close 280 stores across the continent over the next three financial years, a scale of retrenchment that has drawn a formal warning from the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). The closures span three of TFG’s core chains: Foschini, Sportscene and Markham, with some closures already finalised earlier this year.
COSATU’s statement, representing affiliated unions including the South African Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers’ Union (SACCAWU) and the Southern African Clothing and Textile Workers Union (SACTWU), does not oppose the closures outright but calls on TFG to slow down and negotiate. “The business is where it is today largely due to the blood and sweat of its staff,” the federation said, urging the retailer to “engage in good faith and find alternatives to store closures” rather than proceeding with what it called hasty decisions affecting worker livelihoods.
Why a fashion retailer is shrinking its footprint now
The closures are being driven by a familiar retail dynamic playing out across South Africa and globally: weak in-store sales set against a sustained shift toward online shopping. For a chain built around physical footprint in shopping centres, that shift changes the underlying economics of a store network that was sized for a different shopping pattern. A location that made sense when foot traffic alone drove revenue can become a net drag once a meaningful share of the same customer base has moved to buying online instead, whether from TFG’s own e-commerce channels or its retail rivals’.
What makes this round of closures land harder than a routine store-portfolio trim is the timing. COSATU explicitly frames its concern against a backdrop of South Africa’s stagnant growth, quarter-on-quarter GDP expansion of just 0.5% in the first quarter of 2026, and a national unemployment rate of 43.8%. In an economy already struggling to create jobs, closures on this scale, even when individually justified on commercial grounds, remove positions the labour market has little immediate capacity to absorb elsewhere. COSATU also points to artificial intelligence and automation as compounding pressures on retail employment more broadly, arguing that displaced workers are often left without adequate compensation when a closure is executed quickly rather than negotiated.
What it means for landlords, suppliers and the retail property market
A retailer the size of TFG vacating 280 stores has consequences well beyond its own payroll. Shopping centre landlords lose a reliable anchor or mid-tier tenant in each affected location, a gap that can be straightforward to backfill in a strong node and considerably harder in a marginal one, particularly if several retailers are trimming store counts for the same underlying reason at the same time. Suppliers of shopfitting, security, cleaning and logistics services built around servicing a given store count face a corresponding drop in demand, and smaller businesses operating adjacent to a Foschini, Sportscene or Markham outlet, the kind that benefit from shared foot traffic in a mall, lose part of the customer flow their own location depended on.
For South African small businesses more broadly, TFG’s move is also a data point worth watching rather than dismissing as one large retailer’s internal restructuring. If a group with TFG’s scale and e-commerce investment concludes that a large share of its physical footprint no longer earns its keep, that is a signal about where retail demand is actually heading, not just about one company’s balance sheet. Smaller retailers weighing their own store-versus-online investment decisions now have a concrete, large-scale example of that calculation playing out in real time, in the same market they operate in.
TFG has not published its own detailed rationale or a store-by-store closure list alongside COSATU’s statement, and it is not yet clear how many of the 280 positions affected will be redeployed within the group’s remaining stores or online operations versus lost outright. COSATU’s call for good-faith engagement, rather than a demand to reverse the closures, suggests the union movement itself sees the shift to online retail as largely unavoidable, with the real fight being over how the transition is managed for the workers caught in it.
