The Shop Is Becoming the Warehouse, the Locker and the Bank. South Africa Got There by a Different Road.

Who gets the parcel to the door, and what does the last kilometre cost? A courier van that makes sixty stops in one neighbourhood for sixty parcels carries sixty chances of a locked gate, a wrong address or nobody home. Each failed attempt is a second trip. Retail World Magazine traced how logistics companies answered: deliver all sixty to one point. InPost in Poland built a national network of parcel lockers that became the main way parcels arrive in that country. Inditex, the owner of Zara, now rewards shoppers across Europe for choosing a locker over a doorstep. In the Gulf, Aramex expanded pick-up points to carry parcels from Shein and Temu. RedBox built locker banks across Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam. Emirates Post put pick-up counters in commercial centres. The shopper collects with a code, at any hour, and returns a parcel the same way.

What happens when the shop itself becomes the hub?

Walmart added Subway sandwiches to its express delivery in June 2026. Meals arrive in as little as 30 minutes, alongside groceries, from the 1,400 Subways inside its stores. In October it added Dunkin’ from its 150 in-store locations, with plans to extend to most of the 10,000 Dunkin’ shops outside Walmart. The company’s chief financial officer, John David Rainey, explained the reasoning to analysts: “The more omni we become, the more important our stores become.” Deliveries sent from stores grew about 43 per cent in the quarter to July 2026. More than a third of them arrived within three hours. Walmart also said that 65 per cent of restaurant orders included other items from the store. The store is the warehouse. Once a van is on its way to a street, coffee and lunch can ride with the groceries. Coffee is a daily habit; groceries are a weekly one.

The Gulf went further by sharing. In Saudi Arabia the marketplace Noon and the delivery company Jahez made a deal. Noon’s quick-grocery stores appear inside the Jahez app. Jahez’s 50,000 restaurants appear inside Noon. Neither had to build what the other already owned. Majid Al Futtaim turned the back rooms of its Carrefour hypermarkets into automated micro-fulfilment hubs that serve its own apps and partner apps alike. Lulu picks online orders inside its 267 stores. By Retail World’s account, online grocery in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia grew from under 5 per cent of the market five years ago to over 14 per cent. Amazon is now trying the same in Germany, where online grocery is about 5 per cent and discount chains dominate.

Where does South Africa stand?

Further along than the comparison suggests, on two roads at once.

On the first road, online retail reached about 10 per cent of all retail turnover in 2026, the first full year at that level. The figure is R159 billion, according to World Wide Worx with Mastercard, Peach Payments and Ask Afrika. It grew 22.5 per cent against about 4 per cent for retail as a whole. The R29 billion added in one year is almost the size of the whole online market in 2020. Checkers Sixty60 sales rose 34.5 per cent to R25.5 billion. Pick n Pay’s online business was profitable for a second year, with 32.7 per cent growth. TFG’s online sales rose 49.2 per cent. Takealot recorded its first full-year trading profit. Arthur Goldstuck, who leads World Wide Worx, described retailers as building fulfilment, loyalty, marketplaces and advertising “into the same operating system as their stores”. That is exactly what Walmart and Majid Al Futtaim describe.

On the second road, the shop was the platform before the word existed. On 6 November 2026 the money-transfer company Mukuru and the payments company Flash made an announcement. Mukuru customers can now pay for transfers in cash at about 170,000 spaza shops and traders in Flash’s network. Flash belongs to the retail group Pepkor, which merged it with Shop2Shop in August 2026 into a R21.3 billion payments business. How big is the economy those shops anchor? The researcher GG Alcock puts it at R750 billion. Pepkor puts it between R900 billion and R1.5 trillion, with spaza shops alone at about R190 billion. A spaza is already a cash-in point and an airtime and electricity counter. It is a withdrawal point for TymeBank and Standard Bank customers. It is the place that knows which household is home. GoTyme Bank, which became Africa’s first profitable standalone digital bank in 2026 with 13 million customers, grew by meeting people in shops rather than branches.

The warehouse of the future already has a name on the door, and in South Africa it is usually a family’s.

What can the two roads learn from each other?

The locker networks of Poland and Saudi Arabia solve a problem the spaza solved socially: a trusted point where the parcel waits. The Walmart and Noon models solve a problem the spaza has not yet been paid for: when a van is already coming, what else can it carry, and who earns from it?

The open questions for South Africa are practical. If 170,000 shops can take cash for a money transfer, can the same counter take a parcel for Takealot? A return for TFG? A Sixty60 order for a neighbour without a smartphone? And at what fee? Who owns the data about which street buys what, the shop or the platform? And when a spaza becomes a point in a national network, what protects it from carrying the platform’s risk without the platform’s margin?

A magazine cannot settle those questions. The people who run the 170,000 counters are best placed to answer them. The global evidence says the answer is worth money: route density, shared hubs and trusted collection points turned delivery from a cost into a business everywhere else.