Stay Tuned/Neither Hunting Nor Gathering

When it comes to shopping online, fear was never the primary stumbling block in my case. There are other reasons, but credit card fraud was not on the list.

It's true that everyone and his brother probably has my credit card number by now; on the other hand, my particular creditor makes it very easy for me to throw disputed items off my bill. Furthermore, I have never understood why it would be any less safe to send your credit card number onto a secure server than it would be to give it to the unscrupulous clerk at the gas station, who only has to copy it down for later use.

Credit card numbers, like locks on the front doors of most houses, are not really very secure at all when you stop to ponder it, but we all have agreed tacitly to not think about it very often, or it would worry us too much. Or, put more charitably: this is a system which only works when everyone agrees to play nice and not cheat. Then, when someone does cheat and we read about multi-thousand-dollar card fraud in the paper, we all shudder collectively.

Anyway, as I think I was saying, fear isn't the problem. The problem is that there still isn't all that much to buy.

The first people to penetrate web commerce in a big way, interestingly enough, were the providers of various specialty items, the kind where people get embarrassed walking into a store and shopping in person. Sex toys, sex books, erotica, and other such are available for web purchase to such a high degree that it's now only comment-worthy when a major purveyor of such merchandise doesn't have electronic ordering.

Large sizes of clothing and shoes - people get embarrassed about shopping for really big dresses, whether they're genuine females or transvestites. Wigs and falsies and other such appurtenances, same story. We don't want to be caught correcting our perceived figure faults. We want to correct them, but we don't want to be seen doing it.

Aside from items like these, and some other objets d'art, gift items, novelties, and sundries, web commerce is still a dark void - although the success of amazon.com and a few other key sites indicates that void is still rapidly being filled. Nonetheless, even shopping for books online isn't something you do every day, or every week.

Now a few people are trying to allow you to shop for even the most mundane things online. Residents of the greater Boston area have been seeing ads for HomeRuns quite a bit for the last year. This is a service which allows you to order groceries via phone, using a paper catalog, or via their web site. More recently, a company called Peapod has been offering what appears to be a similar service in this area.

Before I talk about either of these two in any detail, I should note that HomeRuns serves only a handful of places in the greater Boston area, and that Peapod is only available in certain areas of the country, although I suspect they're pushing strongly to go national. So if the idea of shopping for groceries online makes you pant in anticipation, don't let yourself get too excited.

HomeRuns is run by the Hannaford Bros. Co. from a big ol' warehouse out on Route 128, which circles Boston. They also run actual grocery stores in the area under other names. Their principle seems to be that, since they're maintaining a central warehouse for their stores anyway, why not offer deliveries from there - in essence, delivering straight from the warehouse to the consumer. The markup on groceries that ordinarily goes into the cost of running a grocery emporium, paying for all those nasty fluorescent lights and surly bagboys, instead goes toward a fleet of vans and people to drive them.

Peapod takes a rather different approach; they are a third-party company which enters into partnerships with various national grocery chains. You place your order with Peapod, and Peapod takes that order to their local grocery affiliate, fills the order, and brings it to you. In essence, you are paying someone else to go to the grocery store for you - although I'm sure that Peapod employees don't actually walk down the aisles with a shopping cart, picking out your groceries - that'd be silly and not very cost-effective. Their site is coy about how it's actually done, but I'm sure they have some sort of special arrangement with their grocery affiliate - otherwise why would they need an affiliate in the first place?

HomeRuns' web site is well-laid-out and very aboveboard. You can inspect their full list of groceries and their current prices, without obligation. You can even do a dry run, pretending to fill out an order, if web sites make you nervous. Since they apparently don't collect the money until they get to your door, they don't need or use a secure server. Their system even allows you to save a regular "shopping list" of items you buy every time you buy groceries - bread and milk and such. Their prices seem reasonable. There's a slight markup (over what I would normally pay for the same item in a grocery store), but not dreadful.

They take pains to answer all questions - one gets the impression that they realize they have some technophobia to overcome, and are taking pains to make everything fear-free. (One of their subway ads says, "Grocery shopping from home. It's a lot less scary than it sounds. And it doesn't sound that scary.") Yes, our drivers carry picture ID's and they always wear uniforms. Yes, you can arrange to have groceries delivered when you're not there. Yes, our trucks are refrigerated and we will accept manufacturer's coupons for a credit on your next order and our drivers appreciate the thought, but they are not permitted to accept tips. In fact, their drivers are apparently on a no-cash basis; HomeRuns accepts credit cards and personal checks only.

I confess that I didn't get too far with Peapod. The site is cryptic about their ends and means, but most importantly, you need some sort of browser plugin to actually get a look at the groceries. Since I am surfing on a Unix system right now, I can't run it. A site which depends on a plugin or any other kind of external program to get to the goodies is a site that is not going to get nearly as much trade as it would like.

At any rate, I can't compare prices to see if Peapod's doing any hidden markup, but I can compare the surcharges you pay for the delivery service itself. HomeRuns has a minimum order of thirty dollars; if your order is from thirty to sixty dollars, you pay an extra ten for the delivery; above sixty, no delivery charge.

Peapod offers two systems, depending on how much you shop. Under one system, you pay a flat fifteen dollar fee per order. The other system charges you a five dollar "membership fee" per month, and charges you five dollars an order plus five percent of the value of your groceries.

The latter system looked like a big ripoff to me until I did a little math. It's actually more efficient, unless you have big-time grocery bills. If you shop twice a month, you'd have to buy a hundred and sixty dollars' worth of groceries per trip - $320 in groceries for the month - before the flat-fee system became cheaper; at that point you'd have paid thirty dollars in service charges that month, under the flat-fee system, or thirty-one dollars under the metered system.

If you have a large household, those may seem like normal grocery numbers to you, but $320 in groceries each month is way over what we spend at Stay Tuned HQ. Either way, HomeRuns looks a lot cheaper - but not being able to compare grocery markup, it's hard to say.

All this price and service comparison, interesting though it may be (well, it interested me), begs a larger question: will the shoppers buy it?

I get the impression - based entirely on HomeRuns' latest marketing blitz, I haven't spoken to anyone at the company yet - that they're fairly desperate for customers. And frankly, even though I find the services interesting, I wouldn't use them myself.

For many people, the grocery store is the only real time they get to see what other people are doing or saying, to see the world. For the old Italian ladies who populate our usual store out in Medford, this is their social event of the week. It doesn't matter if they don't know anyone else in the store (they usually do, anyway) ... the point is to see people talking and shopping and gossiping and so forth.

For me, going to the store is how I learn about new products and what foolishness the evil manufacturers are trying to foist onto the public - and by paying attention to how the shelves change from week to week, learn what things people are buying and what things they aren't.

In short, I think grocery shopping has some importance to people besides just buying groceries. It seems a shame that we've become so insular that this would be one of our few remaining opportunities to see what the other humans are doing, but there it is.

On the other hand, there are people who absolutely despise going to the store, or those who just don't have the time, or those for whom it is physically difficult. So these shop-at-home services will always have a market, I think. I'm just not sure whether it'll ever be more than a niche market.

You'd be upset if I didn't have a truly, deeply cynical reaction to the whole thing, wouldn't you? Well, home delivery of groceries isn't a new idea, exactly - New York City's had places that deliver for ages and ages, and there are plenty of other examples - so I can't talk about how it's going to bring about the downfall of civilization or anything like that. Obviously it hasn't.

I do find it a little amusing that we started our evolution by going to great lengths to obtain our food, and as we have progressed, we've had to do less and less of the work. Now our food can come right up to our door. All we have to do is pay for it.

Is this a Good Thing or a Bad Thing? I am certainly not of the soldier-of-fortune school (Only The Self-Sufficient Will Survive), but speaking as someone who has eaten something I killed, cleaned, and cooked myself, on at least one occasion, I can say that it's definitely an eye-opener, and perhaps should be a required learning experience for those who think food comes in neatly wrapped, cellophaned packages.

[February 2007:] HomeRuns went out of business in 2001. An E-Commerce Times article (which may or may not still be available by the time you read this) implies that other such services (some of which I had not heard of) have not done well either. Only Peapod is still around, and apparently opinions vary on which parts of its operations (which are still confined to Chicago and the DC-Boston corridor, as far as I can tell) are profitable, and what parts are essentially being propped up by its corporate owner, Ahold (see next column for more on them).

At the time I posted this column, I knew I had a regular reader who shopped for groceries from her home. I suspected it might be Peapod, since they had operations in her area at the time (Randalls, mentioned below, is the chain they used there). She sent the following:

"Actually, I think the Peapod guys do stroll the shelves with a cart and pick things out. I miss seeing store displays, though the Peapod browser has a new products section to check out.

"The rationale behind the sign-up to see the browser software, I think, is that it's really a customized database from each store. In my old neighborhood, the Randalls supermarket had slightly different items available than the Randalls in the new neighborhood, both offline and in reality (I have moved back into the fresh boudin zone, for one thing).

"The prices are the same as the market (which is a tad upscale), including the ability to coupon and use the discount card - one gets the actual cash register tape and it's quite the same as a self-shopping one. So, it's $5 for the delivery and about $3 for the shopping fee, on top of $60 of groceries. The browser software is not so bad - basic lists of products and click to read the nutrition label - and they let you type in that you like your bananas green or whatever.

"I get the impression that not too many people are buying the service, though. I mean, there are about three big Randalls stores closer to me than the one that Peapod uses, so obviously they can't support Peapod employees in every store, which was the original plan they started out with."

and now back to our program

The material on these pages is copyright © 1997-2007. All rights reserved.

It is assumed that every brand name, slogan, corporate name, symbol, design element, et cetera mentioned in these articles is a protected/trademarked entity, the sole property of its owner(s), and acknowledgement of this status is implied. When advertising materials are excerpted here it is for express purposes of commentary and criticism, and thereby protected under the Fair Use provisions of U.S. copyright law.