Allambie Heights IGA’s community check-in lane allows shoppers to slow down for a chat
In a shopping world of self-checkouts and rushed grocery trips, Allambie Heights IGA is encouraging its shoppers to slow things down.
At the store, shoppers have the option to go through the community check-in lane when they purchase their groceries, providing the opportunity to have a friendly chat with staff and fellow shoppers.
Long-time IGA staffer and ‘chief chatty officer’ Layne Berry came up with the idea. Layne started off as a junior staff member at age 13, and recently took up a role in IGA’s human resources team. “When I stepped into my HR role, I noticed we had lost the touch of slowing down a bit,” she says.
“So I thought, ‘Let’s introduce something that just slows it down just a tad, makes it a little bit more personable again.’”
The idea was informed by conversations with long-time regular shoppers, some of which have been shopping at the Allambie Heights store long before it became an IGA. “Some of my older customers who I have served since I was a young girl had mentioned to me that they were just feeling like self-serve was getting a little more pushed on them and things were moving a bit quicker,” Layne says.
“When it was highlighted to me by our customers, our loyal ones especially, I thought, ‘We need to do something to change.’”
Store Manager Geoff Dawkins along with IGA staff supported the idea, and suddenly, the initiative ‘really took off.’ What started as one community check-in lane quickly turned into three as the word spread through the community.
At the start, the chatty levels were mostly between the staff members serving customers. “But once we had three lanes going, it would be a group conversation,” Layne says.
“It became more of a group thing than we anticipated, but we loved that because connections were made not only with employees, but with locals and the community.”
Layne acknowledges that ‘some people are in a rush’ due to various factors. “But sometimes you are up for a chat, so that was the idea of having it as a designated lane where if they wanted to initiate conversation and for us to slow down, we could make it happen,” she says.
Following the success of the trial at Allambie Heights, the community check-in lane is now a permanent feature of the store. The initiative has since been rolled out across the seven IGA stores in the same group as Allambie Heights.
But Layne doesn’t want the chats to stop there. “Hopefully working with our suppliers, we’re going to work on getting it rolled out Australia-wide, which would be amazing,” she says.