With schools already open and lessons under way, many pupils are still sitting in classrooms without full uniforms. This comes as major retailers such as PEP and Ackermans continue to hold large volumes of school items on lay-by, including uniforms, shoes, lunch boxes and stationery. Parents say rising costs are making it harder to keep up, and experts agree that the back-to-school burden is becoming increasingly heavy.
Going back to school is meant to be a positive milestone, with pupils arriving with new bags, books and complete uniforms, ready to learn. But for many families, that picture does not match reality, as financial pressure continues to delay access to basic school essentials. Retailers say that they are still sitting with significant back-to-school stock, much of it tied up in unpaid lay-bys.
Lay-by systems, which allow customers to pay for goods in instalments without interest, have long been a lifeline for low-income households, helping parents avoid debt while spreading costs over time. However, as children returned to school, many lay-bys remained incomplete. Daily Maverick visited several stores and spoke to managers who requested anonymity.
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A PEP store manager said parents were often only able to pay the minimum deposit. “We still have a lot of clothes; we have a lot of lay-bys at the back. Not all parents can afford it, so what they do is they will put on the minimum.
People are struggling; they can’t even afford to make that a R1,000 lay-by. They will make a lay-by of R100 or R200, just so that the child can have books and a pen and things like that. This happens every year,” said the manager.
She explained that when lay-bys are cancelled, deposits are refunded, but the items are returned to the shop floor. “We don’t keep their deposit money. They get the deposit money back on lay-by, and it gets cancelled, unfortunately.
They will lose their school items; they get placed back onto the floor,” she said. Another PEP store manager echoed the same concern, saying it was difficult to watch parents struggle to complete payments. “It doesn’t feel nice, because it’s school stuff, but then you must know how much stuff you’re going to put in the lay-by.
Yes, we understand that sometimes a single parent has three kids, and they have to figure out what they’re going to do, but they still can’t afford to take the lay-by. Some customers come and refund the lay-by and take certain stuff out,” the manager said. An Ackermans store manager shared similar experiences.
“It’s a consistent thing where they do lay-bys every year. Those lay-bys sometimes get kicked off when they expire on the system. Some of them really forget about the lay-bys.
Some of them may have relocated to another province,” the manager said. Parents told Daily Maverick that affording school uniforms had become increasingly difficult. Masihlangane Cici, whose child attends Moshesh Primary School in Langa, Cape Town, said unemployment had forced painful choices.
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