You look cute: How electronic checkout slips became a stalking nightmare for South Africa’s women

It has been a hidden danger for a long time. With the advent of technology, other forms of oppression against women have emerged, especially in South Africa. Electronic checkout slips with cashier’s identities are a stalking nightmare for South Africa’s women who work in the retail sector. 

“It’s normal here in South Africa that store checkout slips [have] the full name of the cashier – a line like – Goodbye, served by Ms. Anele White,” explains Noxo Duma*, 33, a supermarket cashier in Johannesburg, South Africa’s commercial capital.

Stalkers’ backdoor

The innocent cashier checkout slips have become an online stalking nightmare for several female cashiers working across South Africa. In March, two strangers called up Duma via Facebook Messenger bragging that they had harvested her name from supermarket store electronic checkout receipts, and ‘you look cute’.

“I was in bed at 4am, and my husband twisted my pyjama collar, accusing me of flirting. He almost assaulted me,” she says.

Duma, like several women GenderIT has been interviewing, changes her surname because she fears to be fired by her employer, and be publicly shamed by family members over this sensitive experience.

South Africa’s retail industry is vast and the wealthiest on the African continent. At ZAR 1.61 trillion ($81bn) in 2022, it is expected to grow at a CAGR of more than 4% between 2022 and 2027. Female labor market participation is high and significant with 1, 56 million women thought to be working in the industry in 2023. “It’s an easier industry to enter for already disadvantaged Black women – low wage; walled careers as cashiers, cleaners, ushers,” says Phuleng Phaka,deputy leader of the NUMSA trade union.

Hence, Duma is a female cashier at one of South Africa’s largest chain supermarkets. Like anywhere on earth, her daily job is swiping debit cards and capturing sales as thousands of shoppers’ stream past her store checkout desk.

Our very names

The electronic paper receipt that Duma gives out to each shopper has a problem – their very names displayed – and that makes it a minefield for creepy men to digitally stalk the female cashiers.

Slyvia Magkatho*, 28, a cashier in a busy hardware store in Durban along South Africa’s Indian Ocean coast, shares the experience of Duma. Last year – on a September day, a man whom she serves weekly in the hardware store approached her via Messenger, and bombarded her with unsolicited romantic messages. She shares her cellphone with her husband who saw the messages and dumped her at her parents’s home for a month. “I was shocked by the stranger’s Messenger inbox messages; I never flirted with him or invited him, but my husband refuses to believe this is a random stranger stalking me on Facebook Messenger via the cashier’s checkout slips,” she says.

I was shocked by the stranger’s Messenger inbox messages; I never flirted with him or invited him, but my husband refuses to believe this is a random stranger stalking me on Facebook Messenger via the cashier’s checkout slips.

- Sylvia Magkatho

South Africa has a grim rate of physical and emotional violence against women. In South Africa, 5.5 women were murdered by ntimate partners per 100,000 women between 2020 and 2021, according to the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC).

The Retailers Liaison Committee of South Africa (RLC), an industry grouping says there is no hard requirement for supermarkets and other outlets to print cashiers names on till slips in South Africa because there is no law that mandates the change, and also, for some small retailers, redesigning the checkout receipts to anonymise cashiers’ names could be expensive and impractical. Each shop is at liberty to choose how it styles it cashiers’ checkout slips ‘with their names or anonymised markers like: served by teller 234,’ says Ralf De Wit, a spokesperson for the RLC.

Totally unnecessary

Too many retail stores still choose to display cashier’s names, says Agnes Ndaba, a former checkout cashier and now trade union gender activist with the National Union of Retail Workers of South Africa. “It’s completely unnecessary, a privacy loophole, and puts female cashiers at the mercy of any stalker with a cellphone, Facebook, TikTok, or Instagram account,” says Ndaba.

Ndaba says in her former job as a cashier, she heard from 15 female cashiers in Johannesburg who says some of the digital male stalkers who harvested their names from checkout slips would create ghost accounts on Facebook or Instagram, send unsolicited romantic messages to their targets, refuse to reveal their identities and bragged of having ‘dirty on them’. “It was so stressful, each time they blocked the stalkers, the stalkers would quickly create a new ghost account and taunt their targets again,” she said.

It's a risky endeavor for victims of digital stalking like Noxo to demand that corporate retail store owners rejig their technology to stop cashiers’ names from being printed.

She wouldn’t dare, she says, describing the gendered power matrics in South Africa’s retail space where managers and decision makers are largely male, white and the cashiers are female, Black, lowly paid and vulnerable. “I would be fired on the spot to tell male store managers to redesign the checkout tech. On any day in my store, there are 100 other desperate women with CVs the books of labor brokers, waiting to take up my cashier’s job anytime,” she says of her personal fears that forces her to continue to work with retail tech that puts her at the mercy of online stalkers.

It’s completely unnecessary, a privacy loophole, and puts female cashiers at the mercy of any stalker with a cellphone, Facebook, TikTok, or Instagram account.

- Agnes Ndaba

According to the state agency Statistics SA, South Africa is in top 5 of the world’s highest youth unemployment rate. Over 60% of those in the 15-24 age group are jobless. For women cashiers like Noxo and Makgatho, the gendered precariousness of employment means that, overally, 35.7% of women compared to 30% for men are out of work. It’s also a risky decision for female cashiers who attempt to report digital stalking to intimate partners at home, says Makgatho. It is ‘far safer’ to brave the digital stalkers that harvest female cashiers’ identities from checkout slips than tell her husband proactively that an online stalker is pursuing her on Facebook or Instagram.

“Being honest would get me a beating; the only option for female cashiers in a predicament like this is to delete our Facebook profiles, and deplatform ourselves,” she says of the gendered catch-22 situation that they face.

Not our job

For Ndaba the trade unionist, the creepy practice of digital stalkers targeting female cashiers is a classic but less-thought-off case of Western big tech being weaponised abroad in poorer countries where legal guardrails are not as robust as in North America or Western Europe. Most suppliers of retail checkout tech to poorer countries like South Africa are big western corporations like Germany’s SAP or US’s NCR Voyix Corporation.

Such big stocks-exchange listed retail tech software providers hardly think that somewhere abroad their electronic checkout receipts are an unguarded open-data trove for creepy male strangers to harvest women cashier names, seek them out on Facebook or X, and pressurise them into offline dates, or blackmail. This is a little understood problem that doesn’t really exist in Western countries, she says Ndaba, so they don’t care about monitoring how end users overseas use their retail tech. “They have a hands off approach. Our few sit down meetings with resellers of corporate retail checkout software sellers, they say they haven’t heard of such a problem such that there would be a need to reconfigure its systems and anonymise the names of all cashiers,” she says.

In any case, retail stores defend themselves that reconfiguring foreign software is expensive, and the software is also patented, adds Ndaba.

 The only option for female cashiers in a predicament like this is to delete our Facebook profiles, and deplatform ourselves.

Brenda Muridili, the spokesperson of the Gauteng Police gender violence division in South Africa’s most populous provinces says they are aware of five women who have reported cases of digital stalkers who have got hold of their names from store checkout slips and later blackmailed the female cashiers via Messenger. It is hard for police to crack down on the digital stalkers because most of them use ghost accounts, and it is easy in South Africa for the perpetrators to simply buy phone sim-cards off the shelf without needing an ID to register cellphone numbers. “It is the police’s job to investigate digital stalkers targeting female cashiers – and we still encourage victims to approach us the police so that we keep our leads fresh,” says.

Sex offenders register?

Though South Africa now has a national sex offenders register, the online register was for years closed to the public until an outcry by women activists led to the register getting finally opened this year. However, Ndaba says, considering that most stalkers commit their crimes on social media, unregulated platforms whose moderators and databases are located offshore away from South Africa it is ‘Herculean effort’ to catch the perpetrators let alone think of successfully prosecuting them.

That for Noxo the cashier, sums up the pillar-to-post frustration female cashiers face when attempting to report nefarious online stalkers and sex-pests who would harvest their names from retail checkout receipts.

“The police will tell you go block the person on Messenger; your boyfriend or husband would beat you for a ‘fake’ blocking or chatting with your ‘secret lover’ on Messenger, retail store managers would tell you it’s too costly to even think of redesigning checkout slips to anonymise their names,” she says.

I’m thinking how this whole scenario fails female cashiers on all levels, their romantic partners getting aggressive at them, the police clueless how to track down online stalkers, and big corp retail stores dismissing calls that their tech opens women to online stalking. As I jog at home, I realise how luckier I am as a woman in South Africa’s social food chain. I am a writer, a respectable job, yet these women cashiers do diligently serve us daily at the store, doing one of the most underpaid jobs around, and are rewarded not only with low pay, but retail tech that sells their names to online sex pests. It’s totally unfair, I feel, though hopeless to imagine I can change it with my cracked writer’s pen.