This Online Grocer Hits the Spot
In our house, weekend "free time" is mostly spent ferrying our seven-year-old son and three-year-old daughter to and from soccer games, gymnastics, and an endless round of birthday parties. Squeezing grocery shopping in between activities condemns us to loading up the cart when our local Washington Safeway store is at its busiest. I confess to bribing the kids with stuff they shouldn't have ("Here's a bag of chips. Now leave your sister alone") just to keep the peace during the long wait at the checkout counter.
So I was intrigued when my brother who lives in Cambridge, Mass., mentioned that HomeRuns.com, the Burlington (Mass.)-based online grocery-delivery service he uses, had recently expanded to the Washington area. So far, HomeRuns makes deliveries only to homes and offices within the greater metro areas of Boston and Washington and a dozen towns beyond Boston. But execs are eyeing expansion to Long Island, N.Y., Baltimore, and other areas.
HomeRuns' conservative growth plan may give the company more ballast than the bigger, better-known -- but nearly broke -- Webvan Group, which delivers to Southern California, the San Francisco Bay area, Seattle, Portland, and Chicago but has pulled out of other markets and canceled planned expansion as capital becomes scarce.
WAFER-THIN MARGINS. Let's hope so, anyway. While HomeRuns isn't perfect, it is easy to use, offers a wide array of food and other household goods at reasonable prices, and delivers on time. The company made its debut in Beantown in 1996, originally founded by Maine food retailer Hannaford Bros., which still supplies private-label goods to the online service. But Hannaford sold its majority stake to the Cypress Group, a New York private-equity company, which pumped $100 million into HomeRuns in February, 2000.
As a private company, HomeRuns hasn't suffered as much from financial-market turbulence as publicly traded online grocers Webvan and Peapod, but the always wafer-thin profit margins of grocery retailing have forced some price increases as financial reality set in.
HomeRuns' hiked its Monday-Saturday delivery charge to $5.95 per order from $2.50. For an additional $5 fee, Boston customers can get goods delivered on Sunday between 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. (Sunday delivery isn't yet available in Washington.) The minimum order is $50, also a concession to establishing a workable business model.
NEXT-DAY DELIVERY. Harried shoppers will find the service well worth the price. Let's start with convenience. You can fill up your e-cart any time of the day or night, seven days a week. Submit your order by 10 p.m. and you can get your groceries delivered the next day (if you want Sunday delivery, you have to order by 7 p.m. Saturday). You can order a week in advance if you like -- a nifty feature if you're going on vacation and don't want to spend your first day back dodging other Sunday shoppers in crowded store aisles.
Most of the time, the service is easy to figure out and use. If you're a first-timer, filling up your shopping cart will be time-consuming. But subsequent visits won't be. That's because the Web site automatically saves your previous purchases onto a master list. When you return, the site lets you choose between shopping by browsing through categories, just as you would while prowling store aisles, or going straight to the list of your past buys. That's a real time-saver.
You can add or remove items from your previous-purchase list to craft your new order. So if you buy the same-size carton of milk each week, you only have to find it in HomeRuns' virtual aisles once.
WHERE'S THE SUGAR? HomeRuns.com is organized like a bricks-and-mortar supermarket, with sections for baby needs, produce, meat, seafood, and the like. There are specialty sections, too, for those who crave Pad Thai sauce or kosher whole-grain kasha. In all, HomeRuns stocks 10,000 items, including office products and magazines, and has a search engine to help you find things that aren't in the aisle you expect to find them. Want to see what you're buying? With most items, one click opens a window that shows the product up close and lists ingredients and nutritional values.
The selection is good but chances are, you won't be able to get everything on your list. HomeRuns stocks plenty of Dannon yogurt, for example, but doesn't have the particular snack-pack flavor combination (half strawberry, half peach) my son prefers. I roast my chicken with fresh tarragon, which isn't among the 11 different kinds of fresh herbs HomeRuns stocks. And some listed items will be (clearly marked) out of stock.
On the other hand, the fact that I don't physically pass items I don't need the way I would in a store keeps me from wasting money on them. Impulse purchases are my weakness when I go to the supermarket -- I have a cupboard full of exotic, and little-used, condiments to prove it. But with HomeRuns, out of sight is out of cart.
COUPONS ACCEPTED. HomeRuns also makes a decent stab at matching the weekly sales flyers that are the core of traditional supermarket marketing. Check out the "specials" page for savings on selected items or gift ideas for Mother's Day or other holidays. There's also a fatter "values" page which lists sale items by category. In general, a supermarket's weekly flyers and newspaper ads will have more specials to choose from than HomeRuns does. But I found HomeRuns' prices generally competitive, especially since I live in a city that has only two major store chains and thus limited competition among supermarkets.
Arranging for delivery is straightforward, too. Click on the delivery page, select the date you want your groceries to be delivered, and a two-hour window between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m. If you want next-day delivery and you finish shopping at 9:30 the night before, some time slots will probably be full. You can pay with your credit card or give the delivery person a personal check. And HomeRuns accepts coupons: Hand them to the guy who brings your stuff, and he'll deduct their value from your bill.
The most pleasant surprise about HomeRuns -- for anyone who has ever waited, fuming, for home deliveries that arrive two hours late -- is that orders arrive on time. In the half-dozen times I've used the service, my groceries have always arrived within the two-hour time window I selected. And they're well-packed. Even the strawberries arrived without the usual dents or mold that are standard in some store-bought containers.
"DIDN'T REGISTER." Deliverers drive identifiable white vans and wear uniforms with the HomeRuns name on them -- no worries about opening the door to questionable-looking strangers. All of the delivery people have been polite and carry their own cell phones so they can chase down any goods you ordered that didn't show up. That happened a couple of times, and each time the delivery man located the missing package and arranged for speedy delivery.
HomeRuns does have some weaknesses. The Web site itself is sometimes slow -- and I connect to the Internet via a high-speed digital-subscriber line. Occasionally, there are too many items marked "out of stock." I can live with having to run to my local supermarket for the half-dozen or so items that HomeRuns doesn't carry or that are out of stock.
Especially irritating, however, is when I order something not marked "out of stock" but find upon delivery that it is, in fact, unavailable. "It's probably because someone else was ordering the same thing when you did and the system didn't register it as out of stock until afterward," the delivery guy told me when I inquired about the "out of stock" note next to the Minute Maid orange juice boxes on a recent delivery receipt print-out. Being short of OJ boxes isn't an emergency. I can always pack some other drink in my son's lunch box. But if the missing item had been an ingredient in a recipe I had planned to make that night, I could have been in a fix.
In the grand scheme of things, those are minor annoyances. For the chance to do my shopping in a half-hour from the comfort of my home instead of two hours trudging through the store, I'll be prowling the aisles on HomeRuns regularly.
So I was intrigued when my brother who lives in Cambridge, Mass., mentioned that HomeRuns.com, the Burlington (Mass.)-based online grocery-delivery service he uses, had recently expanded to the Washington area. So far, HomeRuns makes deliveries only to homes and offices within the greater metro areas of Boston and Washington and a dozen towns beyond Boston. But execs are eyeing expansion to Long Island, N.Y., Baltimore, and other areas.
HomeRuns' conservative growth plan may give the company more ballast than the bigger, better-known -- but nearly broke -- Webvan Group, which delivers to Southern California, the San Francisco Bay area, Seattle, Portland, and Chicago but has pulled out of other markets and canceled planned expansion as capital becomes scarce.
WAFER-THIN MARGINS. Let's hope so, anyway. While HomeRuns isn't perfect, it is easy to use, offers a wide array of food and other household goods at reasonable prices, and delivers on time. The company made its debut in Beantown in 1996, originally founded by Maine food retailer Hannaford Bros., which still supplies private-label goods to the online service. But Hannaford sold its majority stake to the Cypress Group, a New York private-equity company, which pumped $100 million into HomeRuns in February, 2000.
As a private company, HomeRuns hasn't suffered as much from financial-market turbulence as publicly traded online grocers Webvan and Peapod, but the always wafer-thin profit margins of grocery retailing have forced some price increases as financial reality set in.
HomeRuns' hiked its Monday-Saturday delivery charge to $5.95 per order from $2.50. For an additional $5 fee, Boston customers can get goods delivered on Sunday between 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. (Sunday delivery isn't yet available in Washington.) The minimum order is $50, also a concession to establishing a workable business model.
NEXT-DAY DELIVERY. Harried shoppers will find the service well worth the price. Let's start with convenience. You can fill up your e-cart any time of the day or night, seven days a week. Submit your order by 10 p.m. and you can get your groceries delivered the next day (if you want Sunday delivery, you have to order by 7 p.m. Saturday). You can order a week in advance if you like -- a nifty feature if you're going on vacation and don't want to spend your first day back dodging other Sunday shoppers in crowded store aisles.
Most of the time, the service is easy to figure out and use. If you're a first-timer, filling up your shopping cart will be time-consuming. But subsequent visits won't be. That's because the Web site automatically saves your previous purchases onto a master list. When you return, the site lets you choose between shopping by browsing through categories, just as you would while prowling store aisles, or going straight to the list of your past buys. That's a real time-saver.
You can add or remove items from your previous-purchase list to craft your new order. So if you buy the same-size carton of milk each week, you only have to find it in HomeRuns' virtual aisles once.
WHERE'S THE SUGAR? HomeRuns.com is organized like a bricks-and-mortar supermarket, with sections for baby needs, produce, meat, seafood, and the like. There are specialty sections, too, for those who crave Pad Thai sauce or kosher whole-grain kasha. In all, HomeRuns stocks 10,000 items, including office products and magazines, and has a search engine to help you find things that aren't in the aisle you expect to find them. Want to see what you're buying? With most items, one click opens a window that shows the product up close and lists ingredients and nutritional values.
The selection is good but chances are, you won't be able to get everything on your list. HomeRuns stocks plenty of Dannon yogurt, for example, but doesn't have the particular snack-pack flavor combination (half strawberry, half peach) my son prefers. I roast my chicken with fresh tarragon, which isn't among the 11 different kinds of fresh herbs HomeRuns stocks. And some listed items will be (clearly marked) out of stock.
On the other hand, the fact that I don't physically pass items I don't need the way I would in a store keeps me from wasting money on them. Impulse purchases are my weakness when I go to the supermarket -- I have a cupboard full of exotic, and little-used, condiments to prove it. But with HomeRuns, out of sight is out of cart.
COUPONS ACCEPTED. HomeRuns also makes a decent stab at matching the weekly sales flyers that are the core of traditional supermarket marketing. Check out the "specials" page for savings on selected items or gift ideas for Mother's Day or other holidays. There's also a fatter "values" page which lists sale items by category. In general, a supermarket's weekly flyers and newspaper ads will have more specials to choose from than HomeRuns does. But I found HomeRuns' prices generally competitive, especially since I live in a city that has only two major store chains and thus limited competition among supermarkets.
Arranging for delivery is straightforward, too. Click on the delivery page, select the date you want your groceries to be delivered, and a two-hour window between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m. If you want next-day delivery and you finish shopping at 9:30 the night before, some time slots will probably be full. You can pay with your credit card or give the delivery person a personal check. And HomeRuns accepts coupons: Hand them to the guy who brings your stuff, and he'll deduct their value from your bill.
The most pleasant surprise about HomeRuns -- for anyone who has ever waited, fuming, for home deliveries that arrive two hours late -- is that orders arrive on time. In the half-dozen times I've used the service, my groceries have always arrived within the two-hour time window I selected. And they're well-packed. Even the strawberries arrived without the usual dents or mold that are standard in some store-bought containers.
"DIDN'T REGISTER." Deliverers drive identifiable white vans and wear uniforms with the HomeRuns name on them -- no worries about opening the door to questionable-looking strangers. All of the delivery people have been polite and carry their own cell phones so they can chase down any goods you ordered that didn't show up. That happened a couple of times, and each time the delivery man located the missing package and arranged for speedy delivery.
HomeRuns does have some weaknesses. The Web site itself is sometimes slow -- and I connect to the Internet via a high-speed digital-subscriber line. Occasionally, there are too many items marked "out of stock." I can live with having to run to my local supermarket for the half-dozen or so items that HomeRuns doesn't carry or that are out of stock.
Especially irritating, however, is when I order something not marked "out of stock" but find upon delivery that it is, in fact, unavailable. "It's probably because someone else was ordering the same thing when you did and the system didn't register it as out of stock until afterward," the delivery guy told me when I inquired about the "out of stock" note next to the Minute Maid orange juice boxes on a recent delivery receipt print-out. Being short of OJ boxes isn't an emergency. I can always pack some other drink in my son's lunch box. But if the missing item had been an ingredient in a recipe I had planned to make that night, I could have been in a fix.
In the grand scheme of things, those are minor annoyances. For the chance to do my shopping in a half-hour from the comfort of my home instead of two hours trudging through the store, I'll be prowling the aisles on HomeRuns regularly.
Copyright 2001 , by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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