Checkers customers with accented letters and symbols in their surnames can finally breathe a sigh of relief after the retailer confirmed it fixed a technical issue affecting its Xtra Savings system.
The glitch resulted in some shoppers not receiving promotional discounts automatically when scanning their loyalty cards at checkout.
Four years of frustration for Pretoria shopper
Annelie Naudé revealed that she battled with the issue for nearly four years.
According to Naudé, promotional discounts frequently failed to load onto her basket despite products qualifying for specials. This often-forced cashiers to repeatedly verify promotions manually, creating delays and frustration during checkout.
She explained that staff members regularly had to return to shelves to confirm promotional pricing, while senior employees were often required to authorise the transactions.
The accent that caused the problem
The breakthrough reportedly came after Naudé’s husband suggested removing the accent from the “é” in her surname on the Checkers website.
Once the surname was updated without the accent, the discounts began applying correctly and consistently.
Several other shoppers with accented surnames later shared similar experiences online, with some saying new loyalty cards did not solve the issue because their original profile data continued pulling names with special characters from official records.
ASCII vs Unicode explained
The incident sparked discussion around outdated character encoding systems such as ASCII.
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) is an older 7-bit character system limited to basic English letters, numbers, and symbols. It does not support accented characters or many international writing systems.
Modern platforms typically use Unicode, a universal character standard designed to support virtually every written language and special character globally.
Some users joked that systems still relying on ASCII belong in a museum, while others pointed out that certain banks and institutions also struggle with names containing diacritics.
Shoprite confirms technical error
Shoprite Holdings said the issue was traced to a technical error introduced during a routine update to its loyalty and promotions systems earlier this year.
The retailer confirmed that the bug was fixed, thoroughly tested, and successfully rolled out across its systems.
Shoprite also said its automated testing processes have since been strengthened to help prevent similar issues in future updates.
However, the retailer noted that it would still need a customer’s Xtra Savings card number to investigate individual long-term cases more thoroughly.
Similar issues at Home Affairs
The problem mirrors previous technical limitations experienced by the Department of Home Affairs.
Earlier this year, Lesle Jansen publicly shared difficulties registering her son !Khūboab Oedasoua Lawrence’s name correctly because the system could not process the click symbol and accented character in the Khoekhoegowab language.
Following system upgrades, Home Affairs confirmed that South African birth certificates, smart IDs, and passports can now correctly display Khoi-San traditional names containing special characters and click symbols.
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