Before we start, I just wanted to mention that yes, StationStops does advertise Peapod service (could you tell?).

The reason for this is that Peapod is a service which I specifically hand-chose to promote based on my positive experience as a customer, from thousands of other online advertisers.

As you will read in the review, I feel Peapod is an excellent and underutilized resource for busy commuters… I was not paid to write this story, nor have I ever accepted payment for writing any other story on the site. OK! So lets check out Peapod….

My first job out of high school was as a dairy clerk in a small, old-school family-owned grocery store in New Hampshire. One of the store’s legacies was that it was the only grocery I knew of which offered delivery. The store didn’t really advertise the service - for the most part is was just a group of elderly customers who had used the market forever and insisted on still having the service.

Twice a week, all four of us who worked in the market would help answer the phones and take the orders from our customers. Most of them had the same order every week. One elderly woman would include Swansons frozen Mac and Cheese and a case of Budweiser WRAPPED IN PAPER. She always insisted we wrap the Budweiser in paper bags. One day I mentioned this to the boss, and he said that she liked the drinky-drinky and didn’t want her neighbors to know. However, everyone knew. There were few secrets at our store, it was the town gossip center. (Our most famous customer - my high school history teacher Christa McAuliffe).

For the rest of the day we would pretend to be expert shoppers, scooting around the store filling the orders, boxing them (yes, we BOXED groceries, because it makes more sense ;), and one of us would take the van out for the deliveries. I always thought it was a cool service all grocery stores should have, and couldn’t figure out why they didn’t.

12 years later, during the dot-com boom, I worked and lived in Silicon Valley, where the bulk of web startups were incubated. One of these startups was called WebVan. WebVan had the long term goal of delivering all sorts of stuff, but it started (end ended) with groceries. It was only available in a few areas, but mine was one, so I signed up immediately.

Every week I would visit the WebVan site and browse through a fairly comprehensive catalog of groceries, checking off what I needed and how many. It was just as easy as it sounds. My account already had a credit card associated with it, so when I was done I would simply click ‘checkout’ and select a time and date for delivery.

The next day, a very professional and friendly driver (WebVan specifically recruited FedEx drivers with the promise of stock options ), would bring the groceries into my kitchen with these great plastic carry bins, unload everything onto my counter, and I would sign off. Usually, I would get something for free as a promotion, like a bag of chips. Oh, and he wouldn’t accept a tip. It was a great service.

I don’t even remember how much it costs, because it was either free or a negligible fee. The groceries weren’t the cheapest though. But I liked it.

Over a period of time I started using the service less. Emergency milk and coffee outages would force me to the grocery store, where I would simply take care of all my shopping while I was there. But there was another reason as well - because I was searching for food on their website rather then walking by every item in the store like a real market, I found myself just getting the same things over and over. My groceries were boring and predictable, and I never really successfully got out of that.

Eventually WebVan failed, but I think I remember that the major reason they failed was because they were the supermarket, and had actually built their own infrastructure of nonretail grocery stores in strategic delivery locations. This turned out to be a bad idea and tied up a lot of capital. Plus, like most dot-coms of the day, they probably overspent on marketing.

WebVan was history, one of the first big names to hit the deadpool along with Pets.com. The poorly overpainted, resold WebVans were an ubiquitous, cringe-inducing everyday reminder in Silicon Valley that the boom days were over.

Dot.con : How America Lost Its Mind and Money in the Internet Era

During the fallout of WebVan, I started to hear more and more about Peapod, a competing grocery delivery service. Peapod had actually been around since 1989, when it started an online grocery shopping service which came on a DOS floppy disk and dialed in the orders, which completely blows my mind. The only other company I know of which had such a consumer dial-up model at the time is Quicken.

Without going through the entire history of Peapod, suffice it to say that they survived the dot-com bust most likely as a result of being a pure delivery service and does not warehouse groceries itself. After the customer places the order online, the shopping list is handed to a shopper, who walks around an actual retail grocery store and picks the items from the shelves.

Peapod does not have a lot of service areas nationwide, but luckily for a lot of Metro-North commuters, Peapod is available. In NY and CT, Peapod serves:

• Fairfield County, CT
• New Haven, West Danbury, Ansonia, and Middletown, CT
• Long Island, Mount Vernon, and Mamaroneck New York

Mostly through partnerships with local Stop and Shops.

I started using Peapod a couple of months ago, and I like it alot - even better than WebVan.

The variety is better then WebVan was, and the online component is obviously more mature. The delivery is a little different, but just as friendly and helpful. They curiously do not use the cool plastic bins to bring the stuff inside, like WebVan did, they just use plain old plastic bags, and they don’t unload your groceries onto the counter, they just place the bags on the counter, which is fine with me. They do accept tips, and I do tip them - usually $5.

The best part of Peapod in my opinion is to have them bring in the big stuff. This is great. Stuff like:

• Giant packs of paper towels and toilet paper
• Cases of soda and beer
• Gallons of milk and juice
• Those awkward bottles of cheap seltzer
• Cat litter and dog food

I always order extra of all this stuff and we never run out of the basics anymore. Also, I don’t have to wait at the counter for deli or seafood items. Its nice. Yes, I am incredibly lazy.

Another great advantage is that you can pick stuff off of your previous orders, which is pretty much how I start every online session. This makes it virtually impossible to forget the basics - sometimes I find that after I do this I am pretty much done in a couple minutes.

As for delivery, I have always been able to get a next-day delivery, usually in a 4-hour window. For the most part, they show up at the beginning of the window for me, but yesterday they came at the end. Their delivery hours go well into the evening for commuters.

You can also get your groceries delivered while you aren’t at home, but I have never tried this.

As for the boring repetitive factor I found with WebVan, I haven’t really encountered this yet. Maybe I will with time - no doubt every once in a while I will want to actually shop in person anyway. But I feel that the selection and better online experience with Peapod might have solved that problem for me. We’ll see.

Although Peapod’s relatively small national footprint means that most Americans are unable to experience the convenience of online grocery shopping, the company does have a legacy which probably has affected millions of American consumers today.

Before they were Peapod - a name which they changed to on a whim - the founders had originally launched the service with a different name.

IPOD.