Not the best customer service at Fred Meyer

This isn’t a story of a bad customer service experience I had myself, rather it’s a bad experience I saw another person having. I was at Fred Meyer a couple of nights ago and was running my items through those new self-serve checkouts that never seem to work properly. This time it was my steak that wouldn’t scan because the bar code had placed over a corner and couldn’t be flattened for the scanner to recognize.

At the self-serve station behind me was an elderly woman who had a number of clothing items. She was obviously having a tough time getting each item to scan correctly, but she was giving it her best shot. As I was placing my bags in the cart, I noticed another Fred Meyer employee was standing next to this lady. I thought to myself how nice of her to give this customer some assistance.

But I was wrong. The Fred Meyer employee said to the customer: “I hate when people use these type of coupons because now I have to ring up all your stuff again manually”. The poor lady, who just wanted to make her clothing purchase, just stood there probably feeling like she was in the wrong for trying to use a coupon. The Fred Meyer employee grabbed all the clothes in a huff and bought them over to her station where I can’t imagine it took more than 2 minutes to ring up the purchases and redeem the coupon.

Heat Maps at Zillow

I love Zillow. It’s pretty dang cool to type in nearly any address and have it spit out an estimated home value. Several agents I’ve talked to have mentioned they feel the Zillow values are on the low side but are pretty close. We’ve started to look a bit at areas north of Seattle. We lived in Woodinville for six year years and loved our neighborhood. I think Kim and I long to get back there.

Zillow now has “Heat Maps” for 17 cities that visually show the how “hot” an area is based on the property’s price per square foot. Here is the map for the Seattle area. Lots of red = expensive homes.
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