Every month we bring you concrete tips and ideas around a particular outreach theme.
May’s Outreach Thought: The Trader Joe’s Tweak
Do you shop at Trader Joe’s? If you do, you have seen something that you may not even have noticed. While other grocery stores restock their shelves at night, Trader Joe’s does it during the day. They don’t do it for a financial reason, or even because that’s “just the way they’ve always done it.” It was an intentional choice to make sure their employees were in the aisles stocking shelves at the same time customers were in the aisles looking for and deciding between products. Trader Joe’s wanted to make sure employees would be able to interact with customers. So they made a simple tweak to their stocking procedure—a tweak that didn’t cost them anything and didn’t mean they had to do anything differently.
Small tweaks like that can help us connect with people we otherwise might not have without too great a cost. Is there a process, habit, or routine that you could tweak for greater impact? Here are some ideas:
- Shift the timing – Just like the example above, is there something you’re already doing whose timing you could shift to encounter more people? Go to the gym slightly later (or earlier); walk the dog in the evening rather than the morning?
- Inject some regularity – Can you make a part of your routine (the morning coffee stop) more regular in order to start seeing the same people more consistently?
Simple tweaks like these can help position us for faith conversation by laying the relationship connection with those around us and offering more opportunities to notice when they are wrestling with something that may (probably does) have a faith component.
