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To: damniseedemons who wrote (62209)	6/13/1999 7:44:00 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

I think there are 2 competing forces with the grocers. One is negative as you point out - delivery. This can only be remedied if fedex or the post office or somebody starts offering regional delivery and that service moves out of the grocer biz model. Sure delivery is bad but all e-commerce companies need to provide more home delivery than they did before, the difference is they can outsource whereas the grocers can't. THe second item is a positive for grocers and that is the shortage issue with the current model. Right now with grocery stores you have huge logistics expense moving the goods to all these regional stores and additionally vast amounts of shortage of a lot of the items. The centralized webgrocers don't have that problem since they have one warehouse (store) where there was maybe 50 stores for Safeway. So I came to the conclusion that efficient home delivery is the key to the success or failure of this business model. As I say it will be interesting if we see any delivery companies interested in stepping up to this challenge.

To: damniseedemons who wrote (62209)	6/13/1999 7:45:00 PM
From: Sarmad Y. Hermiz	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

>> As an investor, my problem with Webvan and Amazon's HomeGrocer is that the business has very little scale. And even with a 'dot com' as part of the company name, these delivery service companies are certainly more brick&mortar than they are virtual. This is a challenging business model--one that I'm not very bullish on. << How is that any different from books or toys or drugs ? That was Glenn's contention all along.

To: damniseedemons who wrote (62209)	6/14/1999 8:06:00 AM
From: Sam Citron	Respond to of 164684

> these delivery service companies are certainly more brick&mortar than they are virtual. To the extent that JIT warehouses and vans are bricks and mortar yes, but efficient just-in-time delivery of bundles of goods to households is a necessary complement to the virtual web sales and order taking functions. Unless they are information commodities like books, music, or movies, they need to be either picked up by the consumer or delivered to his doorstep, or some combination of the above. It cannot have escaped Louis Borders how in Berkeley, CA, Moe's books is successfully fighting Amazon by offering book delivery by bicycle messenger to the doorstep within a half hour. Logistics are a key component of competitive strategy of web enterprises.