Checkers fixes strange bug for shoppers with accents in their surnames
Shoprite said it fixed a bug that resulted in some customers whose names included special characters, such as accents or symbols, not getting Xtra Savings discounts loaded on their product basket.
MyBroadband recently noticed a peculiar first-hand complaint about this issue from a member of a prominent Pretoria residents’ community group, Annelie Naudé.
“I struggled for four years with my Checkers Xtra Savings card,” she said. “Time and again, I would simply not get discounts on products that were on promotion.”
“The cashiers were irritated with me because I asked them to double-check after every product on promotion was scanned whether the discounted price was loaded.”
Naudé said that Checkers staff often had to return to the product shelves to confirm whether an item was on promotion, which cost her a lot of time.
She also had to wait for more senior staff to authenticate the transactions every time. “It was always the same; it did not matter at which Checkers I shopped,” she said.
Naudé said the issue reached a point where she wanted to burst into tears out of frustration. She wrote a letter to the retailer, spoke with managers, and obtained a new card, but the issue persisted.
The breakthrough came when her husband suggested that she change her surname on the Checkers website to remove the accent on the “e”.
Since she made the change, discounts on promotional products have been consistently applied. She advised others with surnames featuring an accent to try the same fix.
Naudé suspected the issue was because Checkers’ system was not built to handle letters from extended character sets, relying on basic ASCII.
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) is a decades-old 7-bit character set that does not support letters with diacritics or other special characters.
It supports up to 128 characters and is limited to English letters, 0-9 digits, basic punctuation, and control codes.
Extended, 8-bit variants of ASCII that support 256 characters, including Latin characters with diacritics, have existed since at least the launch of the IBM PC in 1981.
However, extended ASCII was not a universally standardised character set, and data could get corrupted or displayed inconsistently between different systems.
The Unicode standard was developed to address this issue and provide a universal character set containing the glyphs every written language on Earth needs.
New cards don’t fix the issue
Several other users with accented letters in their surnames who responded to Naudé’s posts related similar problems.
Another person with the same surname said she had repeatedly tried to get new cards to fix the problem.
In her case, a smart cashier figured out the accent could be to blame, but it took multiple calls to the Shoprite customer care line to resolve the issue.
She explained that every time her ID number was entered into the system for a new card at the store, it would automatically pull her name with the accent. The record, therefore, had to be completely reloaded.
Another user — Louis Krüger — joked that using the ASCII character set required a museum permit. He pointed out that several banks also did not accept customer names with diacritics.
It is unclear whether the character set was the culprit. Shoprite told MyBroadband that it fixed a “similar” bug earlier in the year.
The retailer said this was traced to a technical error introduced during a routine update to our loyalty and promotions systems.
“Once identified, the problem was fixed, thoroughly tested and successfully rolled out,” it said. “Our “automated testing processes have since been strengthened to prevent similar issues in future updates.”
However, it said this glitch would not have impacted a customer over an extended period. “To fully investigate, we would need to review this customer’s Xtra Savings profile in more detail,” it said.
“Our records reflect multiple customers with the same first name and surname, and therefore the customer’s Xtra Savings card number is required to ensure an accurate assessment.”
MyBroadband asked Naudé if she could provide her card number, but she did not immediately provide feedback to our queries.
Home Affairs systems had similar character set issues
Similar technical limitations in South Africa’s birth certificate, smart ID card, and passport applications also previously prevented people with special characters in their names from getting the document.
In January 2026, Cape Talk spoke to Lesle Jansen, who explained that the system could not capture her son !Khūboab Oedasoua Lawrence’s name correctly.
Jansen said the exclamation at the start of the name and line above the “u” in her son’s name symbolised clicks in the Khoekhoegowab dialect, the official language of the Khoisan Nama branch.
Home Affairs upgraded its IT systems to support the characters soon thereafter. About a month after Jansen’s interview, Lawrence was presented with his smart ID card.
“In less than four weeks, the necessary upgrades were implemented, and the limitation is now resolved,” the department said.
“As a result, for the first time in South African history, birth certificates, smart IDs, and passports are now able to recognise and record Khoi-San traditional names.”
Loading ...