talking ideas at fresh & easy

I've been watching with interest MyStarbucksIdeas.com.

In my experience, customers generally know what's what. By listening, engaging, and taking action, you can't go far wrong - it provides the heartbeat for your business.

In our own way, on much more limited resources, we've been trying to do the same thing.

fresh&easy itself of course came from talking to people about their needs and desires. And that dialogue has never stopped.

Every week through our website and our stores, we get hundreds of comments and suggestions, and we try to answer as many as we can.

They're providing us with a rich source of ideas about how to improve our shopping trip. For example, we had a number of questions about whether our fresh prepared meals from our own kitchen could be frozen. So we put a suitable for freezing label on the front of pack for those that can.

Similarly, the fact that we now accept American Express came from the number of comments we had about this.

And there's many more we're working on, as well as trying to find new ways for customers to talk to us.

So an initial hats off to Starbucks, I'll be continuing to watch with interest, and taking notes.

Now where's my coffee...