I recently came across an article out of the Sioux City area about one of the area’s major employers that had installed a Hy-Vee Aisles grocery locker on-site. The busy Avera McKennan Hospital employees, many of whom work odd medical hours, can sign up for a PIN, order groceries online, then pick them up out of the refrigerated grocery locker right on-site. For the company, I’m sure it’s a nice benefit, and for Hy-Vee it’s just another way to help mitigate the cost of the “last mile” that retailers so frequently lament, while also building repeat customer habit. I checked quickly with the Hy-Vee folks, and Christina Gayman, the company’s director of public relations, confirmed that at the moment the only grocery lockers in the metro are at Hy-Vee stores. However, Gayman said Hy-Vee is looking for opportunities to partner with organizations that would be interested in leasing an Aisles Online locker. If interested, you can learn more here.

It’s just another example of the innovation at Hy-Vee. I was an early adopter of Hy-Vee Aisles online shopping — I’ve happily been delivered my groceries for about four or five years — and always curiously watch the grocery industry with great interest because of increasing innovation and competition in that space. Hy-Vee has innovated along with the best of them, and seems committed to continuing to improve the online grocery experience. In fact, on a recent delivery a Hy-Vee employee, who had recently joined the team from a massive global online retailer, was embedded with the delivery man in order to gather direct feedback and ideas from customers. Nice touch. I happily gave my idea of finding a way for the online portal to help identify when new products or different flavors/versions of a product I regularly buy are in stock. And as for the Business Record getting our own grocery locker … well, we’ll just take the whole downtown store right outside our back door on Court Ave.