And it’s not just movies. These days, just about anyone living a major city can get groceries delivered from Peapod. You can order ready-to-cook filet mignon from CookExpress. Streamline.com will do everything from pick up and repair your shoes to drop off your dry cleaning or get your family photos developed. No problem. Just let your fingers do the walking.
Of course, the real sales pitch here is convenience. Anything that can be delivered can be sold online, at least as these merchants of convenience see it. Online grocery store Webvan has moved into office supplies and beauty aids. Along with movies, Kozmo sells jumbo-size movie candy, popcorn and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, not to mention a decent selection of books, magazines and CDs. Future plans include beer and wine, sandwiches from New York’s upscale Cosi eatery and, God bless ’em, Krispy Kreme doughnuts. “I envision Kozmo as the Home Shopping Network on steroids,” says Joseph Park, Kozmo’s 27-year-old founder, sketching out a bazillionaire’s vision as he peels the wrapper off an ice-cream bar.
Lots of folks expected biggies like Microsoft and AOL to grab this turf. Vying for the 80 percent of people’s income that is spent locally, they poured hundreds of millions of dollars into developing digital “city guides” stuffed with restaurant and theater reviews. Only recently have they enabled people to buy tickets to a Broadway show instead of just reading about it. When it comes to the essence of e-commerce, says Boston Consulting Group’s Michael Hansen, “they missed the boat.” People don’t want to surf the Web aimlessly, he argues. “They want convenience and commerce. They want the ability to get stuff done.”
Microsoft and its ilk are pushing back into this arena. Obviously, taking the schlep out of shopping has immense appeal. If you’re one of the 80 million Americans who sit in front of a computer every day, it’s clearly easier to flit over to a Web site than drive to a store short on parking. By the time you get to the video store to rent “Shakespeare in Love,” the local chain is likely out of stock. Online, you just order it in the morning (when the inventory is full) and ask for delivery that evening. At online supermarkets, you can shop from last week’s saved grocery list. Or avoid shopping altogether by telling the store to automatically send you, say, toilet paper every week.
Done well, the results can be impressive. CookExpress.com, for instance, bills itself as the service that “shops, chops, minces, dices and delivers.” The two-year-old San Francisco company ships out ready-to-cook meals for same-day delivery across the Bay Area–and overnight for the rest of the country. For $37.95, NEWSWEEK tested it. Roughly 24 hours after we clicked in our order, a foam box packed with ice showed up at our door in Manhattan: an order of pan-roasted halibut for two in a tomato vinaigrette with roasted potatoes. It took about 20 minutes to heat up the carefully packaged ingredients. Verdict: not bad. Our next order, mustard chicken on spaetzle, was even better. The service even correctly transcribed the optional gift card, in German: Was ist das, der spaetzle? Company founder Darby Williams says the company searches for meals whose success depends on painstaking preparation of the sort that would make “your eyes glaze over.” That way, CookExpress does the work. You take the credit.
It’s not all wine and roses. Having to return some of this stuff isn’t always easy. Sometimes you’re at the mercy of glitchy technology. Katherine Pitta, a 25-year-old resident of Concord, Calif., likes the Webvan grocery store, but certain items from her orders sometimes don’t show up. “They had server problems,” she moans. And while the number of online delivery services swells in big cities, there aren’t so many in the suburbs and fewer in small towns.
That will change. Streamline, for one, currently delivers only to people in Boston and its environs. Come fall, though, it will expand to Washington, D.C., and to other regions after that. Like other services that are fast going regional, if not yet national, it is essentially an electronic homemaker. For $30 a month, the company sets up a dry storage box, partly refrigerated, in a subscriber’s driveway. Every Wednesday or Friday, it stocks the box with whatever you’ve ordered, from groceries to videos to bottled water and meals from Boston’s renowned Legal Seafood restaurants. Linda Godfrey, a 39-year-old mother of three in Needham, Mass., loves it. Streamline provides her groceries every week–automatically sending stuff she always needs, like paper towels. It picks up and drops off her dry cleaning, delivers her Poland Spring water, sends her film to be processed and even takes care of her recycling. It’s not cheaper, but the service spares the stress of packing her kids along on errands. “It’s just so peaceful,” she says. If only the company would take her trash to the dump. “Once Streamline does that,” she dreams aloud, “I’m set.”
She may not have long to wait. Meantime, she could try www.trashpickup.com. Really.
