Secrets behind Checkers Sixty60 dominance 

Checkers Sixty60 have defied all market sceptics, including those who thought retail could not be disrupted in South Africa and others who assumed its popularity would decline post-pandemic. 

Instead, the company has continued to go from strength to strength in recent years despite increasing competition from Woolies Dash, Pick n Pay asap! and Spar2U. 

Launched in 2019, Checkers Sixty60 has become the dominant grocery delivery service in South Africa and has hit record after record. 

Lieketseng Pitse, senior research analyst at Melville Douglas, said the offering has proven that South Africa’s retail landscape can be disrupted. 

Previously, it was thought that retail in South Africa would slowly evolve without many dramatic changes to increasingly penetrate lower-income segments with enhanced efficiency, driving growth. 

Checkers Sixty60, alongside ShopriteX, has disproven this thesis, significantly disrupting the local market and resulting in many of Shoprite’s competitors playing catchup. 

This success has come despite many doubting Checkers Sixty60’s long-term potential. Some dismissed it as a pandemic-era fad, and others thought it would never generate value for the Shoprite group. 

In comparison to these doubts, Checkers Sixty60 has achieved record customer retention and advocacy in the post-pandemic years. 

Given Shoprite’s management team’s clear desire to increase Checkers’ small-format stores and FreshX offering, the delivery platform will continue its incredible growth path. 

Since its launch, Checkers Sixty60 has created over 11,500 jobs and is now delivering from most of the brand’s stores across South Africa. 

It has also created immense brand loyalty in a short space of time, with shopping increasingly interested in acquiring Sixty60 merchandise. 

Pitse said Checkers’ ability to grow the offering so quickly while improving the service is a testament to Shoprite’s exceptional management team. 

The concept of Sixty60, when launched – “for customers to order groceries in sixty seconds and have them delivered in sixty minutes – appeared to be overly ambitious at the time. 

Yet again, the sceptics were proven wrong, with the service achieving 94.4% on-time delivery in the past financial year. 

Crucially, while the service has expanded to more Checkers stores and has an increasing number of users, it has actually improved its average delivery time to 33 minutes. 

Pitse said this improvement has largely been driven by Shoprite’s overall investment into enhanced store infrastructure and distribution channels. 

Not only does this improve Sixty60’s delivery times, but it is also beginning to bear fruit in terms of enhanced product offerings and reduced operating costs. 

This is one of the reasons why Melville Douglas remains optimistic about future returns from its investments in Shoprite. 

Shoprite received approval from the Competition Commission to buy Pingo Delivery – the logistics system behind Checkers Sixty60. 

Pingo is a last-mile logistics provider formed in May 2022 through a joint venture between Shoprite Group and Gauteng-based logistics group RTT.

The company provides on-demand delivery services, specifically the collection of an order placed by a customer on an online shopping platform and the delivery of the customer’s order to that customer within a short period of time.

While Pingo has since grown beyond just servicing and supporting Sixty60 and now works with a variety of businesses, the service is still the largest part of Pingo’s operations. 

However, Shoprite CEO Pieter Engelbrecht said that relying on third-party operators could pose problems as Shoprite was expanding so fast.

He said the acquisition made sense given the retailer’s plans to significantly expand Sixty60’s brand and offer a similar service for spaza shop owners at its wholesale retailer, Cash & Carry.

While bringing this service fully in-house, Shoprite has also brought its customer analytics busy into its fold, giving it complete control over the intellectual property behind its innovation hub, ShopriteX. 

This enables the company to rapidly adapt to shifting demand and further enhance its operational efficiencies, reducing costs and making the company increasingly capital efficient, Pitse said.