An interesting thing happened the other day.
A long-time Co-op member and regular shopper (Hi, Michael!) sent us a comment that said, “Hey, Co-op! What gives!? I was trying to find the phone number for the Service Center on your website and couldn’t find it anywhere. Any chance you knuckleheads could put it in the footer?” (He may have said it a bit more adroitly and much more politely, but I’m paraphrasing here for dramatic impact.)
In any event, I told him not a chance and that was that. Kidding! I thanked him for the good suggestion and added the number to the footer. Easy win! In fact, I thought it was such a good idea I added all the location numbers to the footer. (That’s right, ALL. Over-the-top customer service, people.) If you look at the footer right now, you’ll see them there, in all their phone numbery glory. Just start here and let your eyeballs track southwest.
I share this story because I want you to know that many of the things you see on our website have come from you—our visitors—through your input and suggestions. There’s no band of robots running any of our online channels, and we don’t use AI to generate content. (What’s the fun in that?) This is a lot tougher than it seems sometimes, to be honest. We all rely on technology, and can use AI without even knowing it.
The point is that at the Co-op there’s a ragtag team of coffee-infused writers, artists, designers, photographers, and marketing gurus pushing buttons and writing code and making things happen, to your specs as much as possible.
Hidden camera footage of the Co-op web team.
Even as I write this, our director of marketing is busy hiring a local photographer to shoot beautiful images of our stores and food, because we’d rather support local than use something from the internet, which nowadays may have been generated by AI.
We can’t always fulfill every feature request, of course. (Lookin’ at you, random guy who asked for real-time data on our website on the global avocado market. What do I look like, a miracle worker?!?) But we do the best we can, and if we can’t do something, we’ll gladly respond and tell you why and invite a conversation about it. This is especially true for our members, since they run the place and we take community-ownership seriously.
So, next time you see a glaring oversight on our website, don’t just sit there. Let us know! And thank you, Michael, for the good idea.
Ken Davis is the Co-op’s Senior Writer.
