On Monday, Shoprite issued a press release with a striking image buried in it: a Checkers Sixty60 customer completed an entire grocery shop — 10 products, a basket worth more than R1,500 — in 15 seconds. The order was at her door 31 minutes later. From opening the app to unpacking the bags, the whole exercise took less than an hour.
The timing of the release was no accident. It landed just days after Pick n Pay switched on Penny, an AI shopping assistant built into its asap! app, and three months after Sixty60 launched its own assistant, Pixie. Shoprite wanted the market to know who got there first and with what numbers: 98% of Xtra Savings Plus members have used Pixie, it said, and customers have added more than 4-million products to their baskets with a swipe.
But look past the marketing salvo and something bigger is visible. Notice what neither retailer is boasting about loudly anymore: delivery times.
For the better part of a decade, South African grocery e-commerce was a speed contest. Sixty60 built an empire on the one-hour promise and forced everyone else to match it. That race is over — an hour is now table stakes. The new contest is effort or, rather, overcoming it.
Neil Schreuder, chief of strategy and innovation at ShopriteX, talks about removing “every unnecessary tap, search and scroll”. Pick n Pay’s omnichannel boss, Enrico Ferigolli, told me the next disruption is “removing the effort from shopping itself”. Two fierce rivals, the same pitch, almost word for word: convenience — measured in taps and seconds rather than minutes to the door — is the new mantra.
What makes the fight interesting is that the two retail giants are attacking the effort from opposite ends:
- Pixie predicts: Built in-house at ShopriteX on more than a decade of Xtra Savings loyalty data, it learns what you buy and surfaces it before you ask in a swipe-down “smart basket”.
- Penny converses: Built on Google’s Gemini models, it waits for you to ask in your own words — by voice, text or a photograph of a handwritten shopping list — and assembles the basket for you.
Prediction vs conversation is the surface difference. The deeper one is own-the-stack vs rent-the-brain. Shoprite spent years and billions building proprietary digital capability; its moat is the marriage of that infrastructure with loyalty data no competitor can replicate.
Pick n Pay, playing catch-up under Sean Summers, has effectively hired Google’s intelligence to close the gap fast, trading a measure of technological sovereignty for speed to market.
Both companies concede the approaches will converge: Ferigolli says Penny starts with the conversation and Pixie with the reorder, and “over time, both will do both”.
But there is one aspect to this that neither retailer shouts about: an assistant that removes effort also relocates choice. When Penny picks the ingredients for your carbonara, something chose that specific pancetta — and soon it may be the brand that paid most.
Pick n Pay has confirmed a retail media layer is coming to Penny, letting manufacturers bid on terms inside the conversation — much as they already bid on search placements.
Shoprite, for its part, cheerfully notes that Pixie is lifting average order values. The assistant works for you at the front end and for the retailer at the back. The smoother the journey, the fewer moments a shopper pauses to compare prices, question a substitution, or notice what is being sold to them. Frictionless shopping is not free; it is paid for in influence.
None of this means the technology isn’t useful. It plainly is, and the adoption is real. Yet the anecdotes shared by Shoprite this week — about a power user adding R36,236 of products —are marketing colour, not metrics.
The numbers that matter will arrive with the financial results: does AI-assisted shopping actually shift online sales and margin? Shoprite’s digital business already turns over close to R19bn a year; Pick n Pay’s online sales are growing fast off a smaller base. If Pixie and Penny genuinely raise basket sizes and lock in loyalty, we should see it in the retailers’ reporting by this time next year.
For shoppers, meanwhile, the bargain deserves more scrutiny than a 15-second shop invites. The pitch is that the machine thinks so you don’t have to. That is precisely the problem: a trolley filled without thought is a trolley filled on someone else’s terms. Convenience is the new price — and, as ever, it is worth asking who is really paying it.
McLeod is editor of TechCentral