The Naked Truth about the Sex Shop
Ronnie Price bought the farm 25 clicks from Barrydale in the Klein Karoo in 1989 after a career in sales and other things, including a spell at M-Net. He was 39 at the time and he wanted to chill. The shop came much later - it will be 12 years old in November this year.
It is a strange story, not mind-blowing strange, but decidedly off the wall. And what happened afterwards turned an oddball act into one of the most sublime roadside marketing stratagems known to man.
The farm was doing fine and there was this building by the road that it seemed sensible to turn into a sort of Farm Stall to earn some welcome small change.
Preparing for the time when that would happen, Ronnie painted on the wall facing Barrydale: 'Ronnies SHOP'. A few years later he saw that someone had added in a scrawl the word SEX. He knows who did it now, but he did not then, and now he is not saying. At any rate the shop, SEX or not, was still not open, yet people were beginning to arrive.
“We had customers but we didn't have a business,” Ronnie told me.
Well, that spurred him on to some serious thinking. The crowds rocking up were almost too good for a padstal, so he switched thought and came up with the idea of a bar, a bar miles from anywhere with a name miles from the truth but apparently compelling.
“When we were ready we phoned around to tell all our friends that we were now open and put an 'OPEN' sign outside. We were drunk for the next six months.” The place took off like nobody could believe.
And it has never let up since then.
The shop, the bar, the watering hole, whatever you want to call it has been featured on television programmes in literally dozens of countries. It is without a doubt a major asset to the Klein Karoo. Newspapers, magazines and radio stations sent reporters to find out what goes on behind the green door. And they found it. People go there for a happy time, and sex does not come into it.
Ronnie says that so strong has been the pull of that name that he has never had to spend a cent on marketing.
Busloads come from morning till night. Some days they record more than 200 arrivals. They come for food and for refreshment and, of course, out of rampant curiosity.
The food side is run as a franchise by Denise Ladegaard. It has the almost equally mad name of The Road Kill Café. This name, according to Ronnie, was suggested by Dieter Sowade, then the owner of Avalon Springs. It is a name that, in the spirit of fun, does not seem to put anyone off.
In fact Ronnie says that for all the so-called traditional conservatism of people in the neighbourhood he has had no direct complaints about the names of the shop or the café.
“There was one story,” he recalls, “of an elderly lady in Barrydale who did take offence but she didn’t speak to me. She asked the local Dominee if he could close us down. The Dominee said ‘it’s just a name, they don't actually sell sex there’. To which she is supposed to have replied ‘but they do sell strong spirits’. The Dominee reminded her that her own Bowls Club sold alcohol. ‘Shall I then have that closed down too?’ he asked.”
“And that was the end of that.”
Story by Peter Dearlove, Montagu Mail