Memoirs from Customer Service - Safeway

To Whom It May Concern:

I am writing to complain about the quality and freshness of your Lucerne brand milk. Every week for the past several months, the milk that my wife and I purchase from your [XYZ] location has gone sour prior to the "sell by" date stamped on the container. We thought perhaps there may have been something wrong with our refrigerator, such as the door not sealing when closed, or the temperature not being set low enough. We checked those things and also purchased milk from a few of your competitors in an attempt to isolate the problem. Your competitors' milk all remained fresh beyond the "sell by" date.

I've been contemplating this letter for a while, but was finally forced to write it tonight. My wife and I returned from our local Safeway not more than 30 minutes ago. We opened the brand new carton of milk with an expiration date more than a week away and found it to be spoiled already.

I read the assurance of quality label on your packaging and I know that I could go back to the store and exchange it for another carton. However, that is neither convenient or worth my time and fuel. Nor does it address the real problem.

I am not threatening to never shop at your stores again, but I am certainly not buying Safeway milk for the foreseeable future. I will buy from another source. I may try your milk again after several months to see if the issue has been resolved.

I do not know if this experience is isolated to just the milk I buy, or if all of the milk from this particular store or dairy is of the same quality. I must assume that the issue does not plague your entire company, or surely you would have addressed the problem already.

Thank You,

Ducheznee

-----

Dear Ducheznee,

Thank you for your recent customer feedback concerning Lucerne milk. We are sorry that the quality of the product has not met with your expectations. Your feedback is important to us and we can assure you that we treat all customer input very seriously. 

Safeway strives to maintain the highest levels of quality for all of our products. If at any time you feel one of our products has not lived up to our guarantee, you may return it to the place of purchase for a full refund or replacement.

Please accept our sincere apologies for any inconvenience this experience may have caused. As a token of our sincerity, we have included with this letter several coupons for free Lucerne milk redeemable at any of our stores.

Thank you again for taking the time to write to us.

Sincerely,

Safeway

-----

Sure enough, there were $10 worth of free milk coupons inside. Needless to say we did not redeem them. Free spoiled milk is still spoiled milk.

More Shelf Reliance

One of the owners of Shelf Reliance saw my post from last night about the food storage planning tool. He wanted to clear up some key points and actually left a very substantive comment on the blog. I don't know that any of you actually read the comments, and since I feel Mr. Palmer's remarks are important, I am posting exerpts here along with further commentary.

First up, I am happy to inform you that all orders over $199 are shipped free of charge.

Second, 

It is very true that many of the items that we carry can be found for much better pricing. Anyone willing to do their own canning at the local Dry Pack, for example, will find pricing that doesn't compare to what you will find through an emergency company. It's always a good idea to look for items on sale and store them on your own when possible.

I find it heartening that Mr. Palmer is encouraging people to pursue a less expensive alternative, even though it may harm his sales a bit.

Third, and this is one of the points I tried to convey, 

Some customers find it convenient to just get everything at once. THRIVE Food Storage is definitely a premium name and you are paying for higher quality. Because we teach people to use their food storage, we need to make sure it tastes great:) We also offer some 60 foods more than is available through the Dry Pack.

And finally, 

Our packages are built around a 2000 calorie diet. Most companies try to sell you a "year supply", but if you were to dig into the details you will find that they calories per day won't keep you alive very long. The buckets sold at Costco are a prime example of this. For $100 you can buy a 'three month' supply of food, but when you do the math you have to live off of 460 calories a day.

First off, thank you Mr. Palmer for taking the time to provide some color on this topic. You obviously care a great deal about your products and the reputation of your company. As I told Mr. Palmer personally via email, I like Shelf Reliance a lot, and I hope that sentiment was conveyed in the original post.

I think it is safe to say that THRIVE may not be a solution for everybody, but it is definitely a solution for somebody. Everything has a cost associated with it. It took me several hours of my time to build my #10 can rotating system/workbench. What is my time worth? There is a price beyond the cost of the food to go to the dry-pack. Also, as Mr. Palmer elluded to, there are quite a number of THRIVE foods in my free food storage plan that are not available elsewhere (dry, in #10 cans - to my knowledge).

• Sweet corn
• Mushrooms
• Carrots
• Raspberries
• Strawberries
• Bananas
• Apples
• Cheese
• Tomatoes
• Chicken bouillon
• Butter

THRIVE's solution may seem expensive to me. But for somebody who wants to get the job done without worry, hassle, time, travel, shopping, effort, etc., Shelf Reliance offers a viable solution that definitely has value.

My Christmas Gift to You

I've got another gem of a tool for you.

Sumo Paint is like Photoshop's little brother. It can do many of the same things that Photoshop does, and just as nicely. Its interface is quite a bit simpler due to the fact that it lacks most of the highly complex, professional-level functionality intended for Photoshop's uppercrust. 

Big deal, right? Image editors are a dime a dozen, right?

Well, not only is Sumo Paint simple and powerful, it's also free.

Oh yeah. It's also entirely web-based. This is Web 2.0! 

It's as though you have the software installed on your machine, but you don't. It's on the Internet. You've got your File menu, your Edit menu and all of your other menus, just like when you use applications on your computer. But Sumo's not on your computer. It's on the Internet. 

Processing power? Compatibility? Upgrades?  

Forget about it. You're in the cloud now. If you have an Internet browser, you can use Sumo Paint. You can still store your images on your local machine, so don't worry about privacy. Not that I'd recommend Sumo-ing your driver's license or credit card - you know, being that the app is web-based. Or, if you want, you can store your images on Sumo's remote servers. Personally, I'm keeping mine in house for now - but I don't object to outsourcing the storage should I ever feel the need.

Let's face it, Photoshop is the Everest of image editors, but it is also quite expensive AND extremely complicated for the average user. GIMP is a free, open-source alternative, but still complex. You could pick up Photoshop Elements or Paint Shop Pro or something, but those still cost. Sumo Paint doesn't.

I may not use it at home because I still have an old, primitive copy of Photoshop that is still functioning, and I am trying to become more proficient with it. But for work? You bet. When my only employer-provided option is MS Paint - are you kidding?

WordWeb

Every day I get an email from radio tech talk show hostess Kim Komando. Every day she offers a short review and recommendation of a free computer software download. These are things like organizational tools, security software, system tools, games, graphics/music/video programs, etc. In all cases she has investigated the companies behind the product and tested the software herself before recommending it to her listeners/readers. I've tried several of them over the years and still use many of those free apps such as:

• AVG - virus protection, comparable to Norton or McAfee
  
• Scribus - a free desktop publishing package similar to PageMaker
  
• GIMP - the free Photoshop

Most days I simply skim Ms. Komando's description of the software and move on. I keep a lookout for something that meets an actual need that I have. AVG AntiVirus, for example, saves me the $60 annual subscription fee charged by most of the alternatives. AVG does offer paid products such as their premium security suite, but they give their antivirus software away for free to get you in the door. Thus far, I haven't been compelled to step up to a more powerful product, nor have I experienced a security breach of any kind since I've been using their product.

Scribus solved a problem I was having where I needed to create unique text wraps around and within custom shapes. There may be a way to do it with Office, but I couldn't figure out how to do it. Scribus allows me to edit the points of my shapes and place text on the inside of those shapes, whereas Word and PowerPoint only allow me to wrap text around the exterior of a predefined or custom shape.

My new favorite is a dandy of an app called WordWeb that was featured a few days ago. I can't believe how much I'm using it. WordWeb is a dictionary/thesaurus/encyclopedia all rolled into one very easy to use package. It is not a spellchecker, per se. The app resides in the system tray next to the clock. You use it by holding the CTRL key and clicking on any word with the right mouse button. Up pops a small tabbed window containing everything you could possibly want to know about the word. 

I'll show you. Pick a word - "varmit" - got it. Oh, WordWeb told me that is not a word and suggested I might actually be looking for "varmint". That's true, I was. Here's a screenshot:

This works on any text (read: not words in an image file). I like having a universal solution that works anywhere within my operating system. Word, Excel, Internet browser, blog, whatever. Same process. Same interface. Just today it saved me, in two separate work-related emails, from using words that did not mean what I thought they meant. Anything that can help me not come off as a half-wit (I just used WordWeb again to find a synonym for "moron").

If you're interested in experiencing the same enlightenment I now enjoy, you can find WordWeb here: http://wordweb.info/. The download on the left is the free version.