The Broadcast Research Council of South Africa has released its Establishment Survey focusing on products and brands for 2018.

The survey is based on the findings of more than 3,000 South Africans weighted to be fully representative of the country’s demographics.

The average monthly income of these respondents was R12,491 with 16% obtaining a tertiary education, 50% holding a matric, and 33% holding a below matric-level education.

Half (51%) indicated that they were not currently working, while a further 50% indicated that they had children below the age of 15 years living at home.

The most popular place to shop

According to the survey’s results, Shoprite is the most popular retail store to shop across South Africa, with 68% of respondents indicating that they shopped at the store from January – June 2018.

This was followed by Mr Price (38%), Pick n Pay (37%),  and Pep (34%) – indicating that South Africans are willing to shop around to find the best deal.

When asked which stores they most often prefer to do their grocery shopping, 45% of respondents said that Shoprite is their first choice, followed by Pick n Pay (17%), Spar (12%) and Checkers (7%).

Notably, a large number of shoppers indicated ‘other’ stores as a preference (17%), with this number likely made up of a mixture of both higher-income stores (such as Woolworths) and lower-income localised stores.

The survey also broke down the average monthly household and personal income of shopper as follows:

BusinessTech poll

A poll of 7,453 BusinessTech readers taken in August 2018 showed similar results to those in the above survey.

While BusinessTech did not survey the income level of its respondents, they are likely in higher-income band than those in BRC’s Establishment Survey.

BusinessTech combined the survey results for Shoprite and Checkers which was named as the most popular place to grocery shop (34%) while Pick n Pay followed as a close second (33%).

Spar and Woolworths were effectively tied in third place (14%) with only a handful of votes separating the two.