Gentle Readers,
It doesn't take a genius of Miss Dish's caliber to say,
'My god, this Internet gizmo stuff is quite exciting.' Miss
Dish recalls an episode of Buck
Rogers or some such science-fiction fantasia she watched
as a young girl in which people punched a few keys on a computer
and--zap!--hamburgers, milkshakes and all sorts of treats
magically appeared down a chute, perfectly prepared. Wow!
Imagine if this could really happen. Could it?
Miss Dish decided to explore the possibilities online with
the Internet takeout and delivery service food.com.
Formerly cybermeals.com (wonder how many pesos the
company had to pay to land its new domain real estate?),
food.com was founded in the late 1990s by some Hollywood
types courting serious venture capitalism (Tim Glass,
one of the co-founders, says he was inspired by watching
Sandra Bullock order a pizza online in a movie).
The chairman, president and CEO of food.com is a heavy hitter
named Richard Frank, former chairman and CEO of Comcast
Content and Communications (C3), which he founded in
1995 with industry giant Comcast; Frank is also a former
chairman of Walt Disney Television and Telecommunications.
OK, so it has some blue-chip leadership, but is food.com
any good?
Miss Dish logged onto the site and plugged in her address.
She noted that she wanted delivery service. Within seconds,
a list of restaurants that were willing to deliver to Miss
Dish's estate in Northeast Portland popped up. Here comes
the disappointment: Only four restaurants appeared, and
three of them were pizza joints. The remaining option, Billy
Reed's Restaurant and Grill, seemed appealing. It's
a new place on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard that Miss
Dish had been interested in trying out. But, after clicking
on the "view menu" button, Miss Dish learned to her dismay
that Billy Reed's required a minimum order of $100 for delivery
and tacked on a $50 delivery charge. This was no quick fix.
Still determined to try out the service, Miss Dish went
for one of the pizza joints. B.J.'s Pizza Grill and Brewery
on Northeast Weidler Street charged $1.50 for delivery.
Miss Dish maneuvered through the scroll-down menu options
and placed an order to arrive several hours later, at 7
o'clock that night. At 6:45 pm the delivery person arrived.
When asked if B.J.'s gets many online orders, he seemed
puzzled. He held up the receipt that lists B.J.'s phone
number and said, "Everyone just calls."
Moral of the story: This service will never be useful to
Portlanders unless more restaurants are offered and delivery
charges are standardized. The current system--food.com receives
the order and then calls or faxes the restaurant, which
then sends out its own delivery person--needs to be expanded.
Food.com should hire its own team of delivery drivers to
pick up orders from restaurants that normally don't deliver.
Or, how about a hot-food delivery service akin to homegrocer.com?
In this scenario, a central restaurant would be in business
strictly to fill online orders that are delivered via heated
truck.
Until then, the insta-meal we see in science fiction is
still that: fiction.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Willamette Week | originally
published January 12,
1999
|
