SEATTLE – Has enough time passed since the sensational demise of Webvan.com and its Web-to-doorstep grocery delivery peers for another company to try again?
Amazon.com Inc. sure hopes so.
The Web retailer quietly began taking orders for fresh produce and other grocery items Wednesday from residents of Mercer Island and dispatched a fleet of 12 delivery trucks from its grocery distribution center in Bellevue to deliver those alfalfa sprouts and acorn squash in one-hour time slots.
Craig Berman, an Amazon spokesman, said the company is working with local wholesalers and farmers and aiming to have inventory sit in the warehouse for less than 24 hours.
The new Web site, http://fresh.amazon.com, was first available to a small number of Amazon grocery customers on Mercer Island who were invited by e-mail to help test the business. Web surfers can visit the site and type in their address to see if AmazonFresh is available in their neighborhood.
The selection includes organic, kosher, wheat-free and other specialty categories, but not books, music or sporting goods, and the shopping cart and checkout process are completely separate from the main Amazon.com site.
Mercer Island customers can even order groceries for early morning delivery, and AmazonFresh drivers will leave the food in a reusable, insulated tote on the doorstep by 6 a.m. The company also plans to open grocery pickup locations in Bellevue and Kirkland, suburbs to the east of Seattle.
Berman said Amazon is starting very small, and that there’s no telling whether the company will expand the program beyond the island community of about 22,000.
The low-profile launch of the service is understandable given the collapse of delivery services like Kozmo.com, Urbanfetch, Webvan and HomeGrocer.com (in which Amazon invested $42.5 million before Webvan acquired it) during the dot-com bubble. Webvan, a grocery service that boasted 750,000 customers in cities including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and Chicago, burned through $830 million in two years before filing for bankruptcy protection in 2001.
Peapod LLC, one of the dot-com survivors, still delivers groceries in several states, some in conjunction with the Stop &Shop Supermarket Co. Safeway Inc. also lets customers in six states and Washington, D.C., order groceries online.
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