Web Van (who bought out HomeGrocer.com) declares bankrupcy!

[rbfar@ebuilt.com]

Those are really good observations.

I never understood why Home Grocer had to sell out to Web Van.  I was a Home
Grocer customer and they lost me when Web Van took over.  I had a friend
that used to work there and he said they were constantly improving the
bottom line even though they were losing money (positive slope)...

There was a day when I thought everything would be delivered to you and
commerce would be completely changed by the web.  I am surprised it didn't
happen.  And I still am!  I guess most of it was because people blew too
much money on fancy corporate furniture and crap like that.  But that
couldn't have been all of it.  It seems like viable e-commerce business
models are failing.  Why?  There must have been someone out there who didn't
blow the VC money to hell.

I'll be little kookoo now:  I wonder if the established industries (say a
Safeway corp., Kmart, Wallmart, etc.) did what they could by controlling
supply chains to kill e-commerce....Hows' that for a conspiracy theory ? ;-)

R

----- Original Message -----
From: "Gregory Alan Bolcer" <gbolcer@endeavors.com>
To: "FoRK" <fork@xent.com>
Sent: Monday, July 09, 2001 4:08 PM
Subject: Re: Web Van (who bought out HomeGrocer.com) declares bankrupcy!


> 750k stranded customers.  The problem was, WebVan Web GUI
> sucks.  The HomeGrocer.com Web GUI was far better and the
> WebVan guys ruined it.
>
> >From my sister: if you had to make a recipe like Lasagna, you
> went to the recipe section and were able to quickly add an abundance
> of lasagne related items to your shopping cart.  WebVan completely
> ruined that.  Instead of being able to group things, if you wanted
> sauce to make lasagne, you had to first choose vegetables, and then
> discriminate between fresh and canned, and then get stuck down in
> a top down trail of choices which always ended up in the wrong
> area as you had to know to pick sphaghetti instead of tomato products
> to get the sauce you needed.   After 5 minutes of frustration, you have
> to repeat the whole thing over again for cheese and noodles, etc.
> It's shorter to just go to the store at that point.
>
> It's worse than a non-linear phone menu structure on a bad Kafka trip.
>
> Greg
>
> ThosStew@aol.com wrote:
> >
> > In a message dated 7/9/2001 1:47:53 PM, rbfar@ebuilt.com writes:
> >
> > >I really liked their business model... I can't believe this!!!
> >
> > For a consumer's viewpoint, an excellent model.
> >
> > Tom
> >
> > http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork
>
> --
> Gregory Alan Bolcer        | gbolcer@endeavors.com  | work: 949.833.2800
> Chief Technology Officer   | http://endeavors.com   | cell: 714.928.5476
> Endeavors Technology, Inc. | efax: 603.994.0516     | wap:  949.278.2805
>
>
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