Last year, a Four Square owner said something to me that I’ve thought about ever since. Liza Bennett, who runs Four Square Bulls, put it simply, “the store doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to my community.”
She wasn’t talking about shelving. But it’s stuck with me through every project I’ve worked on since, because it captures something I see play out differently between operators and between suppliers.
When a store owner starts thinking about upgrading their shelving, the instinct is often to start with product. How many bays? What categories need more space? Where does the gondola end? Those are legitimate questions, and they matter. But they’re the second conversation, not the first.
The first conversation is about the people who shop there. I’ve worked on projects where an operator has walked me through their store, telling me who comes in on a Friday afternoon, what the elderly customers struggle to reach, and which aisle the kids cut through on the way home from school.
That information changes how the shelving solution looks. It changes the height of the runs, the width of the aisles, and the placement of the categories.
A store designed around its shoppers works differently from one designed around a planogram.
The shelving company you choose should be asking those questions. Not just taking your floor plan and returning a layout.
Sam McHardy is Commercial Manager at Volume, New Zealand’s specialist supermarket shelving supplier. Read more in the latest issue here
