Shopping in a brave new world: Checkers’ Smart Trolley arrives
South Africans have built entire micro-lives in the checkout line: the strategic last-minute chocolate bar, the sudden realisation you have forgotten the one thing you came for. Now, Checkers is trying to delete that experience from the script.
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On an ordinary supermarket run, the great modern ritual is not choosing tomatoes or arguing with yourself over which coffee is “worth it”, it is queueing.
South Africans have built entire micro-lives in the checkout line: the strategic last-minute chocolate bar, the sudden realisation you have forgotten the one thing you came for. Now, Checkers is trying to delete that experience from the script.
The company’s new “smart trolley”, officially branded the Xpress Trolley, is being trialled as what Shoprite calls South Africa’s first smart shopping trolley: a cart with a built-in screen and scanner designed to let shoppers scan-and-bag as they go, keep a live running total, and then pay on the trolley without doing the traditional cashier-to-belt-to-bag choreography.
How the Xpress Trolley works
It is, on paper, straightforward. You start by scanning an Xtra Savings card below the screen, load the shopping bags provided into the trolley, and scan each item’s barcode before it goes into the cart.
The screen shows your basket total in real time, along with product information and personalised promotions. The trolley also offers in-store navigation, which is a subtle but telling feature, because it treats the supermarket as a map you might need help decoding.
Then comes the headline promise: skipping the queue. Customers head to a dedicated checkout lane and pay directly from the trolley, using the bank card saved on their Checkers Sixty60 profile.
A printed till slip appears, a gate opens, and a concierge is on hand for support, which is a small human presence stationed at the edge of the automated future.
A limited pilot, not a nationwide rollout
This isn’t a nationwide rollout yet. Checkers has been explicit that this is a pilot in the Western Cape: after initial internal testing at Checkers Hyper Brackenfell in mid-August 2025, the company said 10 trolleys would be made available to customers at that store and another 10 at Checkers Constantia.
Reuters, reporting on the trial, similarly noted a limited initial deployment and framed it as part of Shoprite’s broader omnichannel strategy.
Omnichannel, explained in aisles and screens
“Omnichannel” can sound like boardroom fog, but in this context it has a clear shape. ShopriteX (the group’s innovation team) built the trolley, and Checkers has positioned the pilot as one more step in tightening the link between the brand’s digital ecosystem and its physical stores.
The payment method is not incidental: it relies on the card already saved to your Sixty60 profile, folding the in-store experience back into the same account-based world that powers delivery and loyalty.
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When the basket becomes a dashboard
The Xpress Trolley is easy to sell as a convenience story: fewer queues with more control and faster trips. The Xpress Trolley also carries your attention. Your total is always visible while your promotions are personalised and your route can be guided.
In the old model, a supermarket was a place you wandered, got tempted, and eventually surrendered to a cashier. In the new model, you carry the number with you in your trolley.
That is the “brave new worldness” of it: the idea that the store experience becomes a managed, data-lit journey with less drift and more direction. Even the language around it leans that way.
Shoprite’s Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer, Neil Schreuder, described the pilot as a way to “reimagine the in-store journey” for a more frictionless experience, and the company has stressed that the point is real-time control rather than mere novelty.
The friction behind the frictionless
Of course, there are practical questions hovering behind the glossy pitch, because every frictionless system has to put the friction somewhere.
How do you prevent misuse? How do you keep hardware reliable in the unforgiving ecosystem of supermarket trolleys - a world of wobbly wheels and collisions that feel like minor acts of war?
How quickly do shoppers adapt, especially those who prefer the familiarity a staffed till? Checkers has not presented the pilot as a learning exercise, explicitly saying the group will use insights from the trial to affect the future of retail locally.
South Africa’s turn at the smart-cart experiment
There is also a broader context: smart trolleys have been trialled internationally, and Reuters noted similar experimentation in other markets, while emphasising that this is the first local trial of its kind in South Africa.
South African retail is defined by intense pressure on time, budgets, and security, and by a public that can be both eager for convenience and deeply suspicious of systems that feel like they are watching.
What the smart trolley really signals
Still, it is difficult to ignore the symbolic weight of this little machine. A trolley with a screen is a message about where the supermarket believes the world is going.
It suggests a future where the store might become a personalised interface, one in which your loyalty profile is your passport, your basket is your dashboard, and the last human interaction might be a concierge smiling as you exit through a gate.
For Checkers, the bet is that shoppers will accept that trade: a slightly more “managed” experience in exchange for control and fewer queues. The Xpress Trolley is, at minimum, a sharp glimpse of how physical retail is trying to keep up with the expectations created by on-demand, app-driven life.
Whether this becomes normal will depend on what happens when the novelty wears off, and the trolley has to survive real shopping: rushed, messy, impatient, and still human.
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