At heart the 45-year-old mother-of-two is a survivor. As a purveyor of happiness and a student of human nature, Alma is a woman who knows what is important in life and does her best to spread the message. Her disciples – the hundreds of shoppers who frequent the New Farm supermarket, one of whom set up a Facebook fan page in her honour – call a moment with her getting their “Alma-fix” and an “Al-mazing experience” which leaves their day just that little bit brighter. The woman herself just shrugs and says it is her calling. “It is about that special fairy dust you leave behind, the contact you have with people,” she said in a voice which still carries the legacy of her Bosnian birth.

“Someone much smarter than me said something like ‘people will never remember what you said, but they will always remember what you did’. And that’s it, you know. That is the secret formula for success. For anyone.” She began sprinkling that ‘fairy dust’ on her customers at the New Farm Coles in 2004, when she went to work in the supermarket’s deli. “I was there for nearly four years, hidden behind that counter there, with the silly hats we have to wear,” she said. “But I never treated my customers as numbers. I always treated every single person as an individual, which is exactly what we all are. Everyone is so beautifully different and we deserve to be treated that way.” It wasn’t until a new manager started [“Warren, he is just so wonderful. He totally understands me and our customers.”] that Alma’s curly hair was freed from her deli hair net.

“He said, ‘let’s do something different, because we are different, people in New Farm are different, beautifully different’ and I said ‘so am I and I can do more than this’.” Soon after, Alma bought herself a giant red hair bow on a whim and wore it to add a little cheer to her work day. It quickly became a talisman and when she didn’t wear it, customers wanted to know where it was. Her boss decided to take it one step further and asked how she would feel about dressing up; on Valentine’s Day 2011, Alma became a heart and a Brisbane legend was hatched. After hiring the first few costumes, Alma now makes and sources her own, a process she said allows her to be much more individual and “it means I can surprise people as well”.

“In the costumes you have to be comfortable, especially in front of so many people. And people do come, especially when I dress up, they do come, even when they don’t want to come and shop – and they come from all sorts of different places, not just New Farm and Teneriffe any more - they come from all over. “But it is all about the engagement with people. It’s not me dressing up and standing there like a statue, you know. It’s the whole play that we all, all the staff and customers, deliver together. “And so much is because of the customers. If it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t be where I am, you know? “No matter how hard you try, if the people didn’t respond, you would have nothing. But people are amazing. Because I am still just a ‘checkout chick’, I am still a stranger, you know? But the people just let me in. “I hope people wouldn't just see me as a crazy little old lady, down the road and making fun. I think I am much more than that. “

And she is – the woman in the bow is a world away from her past as a displaced refugee searching for a new life. As a young woman, just 24-years-old, Alma, her mother, younger brother and four-month-old baby girl, fled war-torn Bosnia Herzegovina in the early 1990s and found themselves in a refugee camp in Italy. “It was quite a journey,” she said. “No matter where you are as a refugee, God help you. It was a really terrible experience for me. You can’t go lower than that – there is nothing else, except maybe if you become homeless, which is, in a way, what being a refugee is – but it is still a little bit better than people living under the bridges and things, because you are at least living in an organised madness. “We were in Italy, in the military barracks there and we all tried to live and raise our little babies.

“But I was young and full of life and even through very broken and disappointed in these people – starting with Bosnia and the war and refugee life – I was still kicking and I had a daughter and I had to look for something, somewhere, which was better. “I couldn’t care less where I went. Just some place better.” A quirk of fate – the American program accepting refugees had just been filled when Alma made it to the Roman agency – saw her interviewed and eventually accepted by Australian authorities. On July 10, 1995, Brisbane greeted Alma and her family with a rainy day before they were whisked to Moorooka for their adjustment period. “It was tough, very tough , but the big picture for me, was I was in heaven. We had a chance, we were safe, you know.”

As she had in Italy, where she added fluent Italian to her native Bosnian, Alma threw herself into learning English, while taking “whatever job I could do, you know, those jobs that immigrants do” to help her and her family get ahead. But she said it was a period in her life which taught her to never complain. “If you end up being a refugee, or you lose everything and you are in a different country, out of your comfort zone, what do you do? What do you do? You try and make your life better,” she said. “You can’t just sit there and cry and be desperate and be miserable, because who cares about you then? Because maybe everyone else is maybe miserable. You have to work with what you have and do something to make it better. And everyone can do that. Loading

“But what I have learnt is that people are basically good. I have experienced the bad in life and I have met and come across bad people. But there are much more good people in the world. No matter what religion, what nation and so on, at the end of the day, no matter what you make, what we do, we are all just trying to be good people and we deserve people showing good back to us. “And that is what I remember and that is what I try and pass on. All these lovely people, our customers, who have embraced me, they just keep confirming to me that there is good in the world. And if you can find it in a supermarket, you can find it anywhere.”