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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Tuesday, October 9, 2001

Hawai'i Tech
Online grocery services down to two

By Vicki Viotti
Advertiser Staff Writer

Serving customers who want to buy their groceries online is a niche market, and Hawai'i is discovering how narrow that niche is.

About 18 months ago, three separate online grocery services had been launched on O'ahu, and in January the "Foodland To Go" Web site made it four. But since spring, two of these businesses have folded.

This leaves Foodland and Akamai Grocery Service, a personal-shopper enterprise run by Jackye and George Peacock, serving Honolulu to Hawai'i Kai and the Kailua-Kane'ohe area.

"I gave it my best shot," said Ruth Sheets, a Kailua nurse practitioner who decided she couldn't make a go of her Onlinegrinds.com service about a year after its birth in April 2000.

And at the beginning of October, HOG, or HawaiiOnline Grocery, posted a notice that it was closing its virtual doors. Bill Sankey, the business' owner, could not be reached for comment. The notice expresses "great reluctance that we have chosen to move on and are very sorry to have to close HOG," which had maintained its own grocery inventory and delivered direct from its warehouse.

Foodland officials did not return calls requesting an update on Foodland To Go. According to the posting at the site, customers submit orders from the site at least three hours in advance of pickup at one of three participating stores: Beretania, 'Ewa Town Center or Hawai'i Kai. A surcharge of $4.95 is added to the bill, which is to be paid by credit card only.

Akamai, the other survivor, does not maintain an interactive online order blank like the one at the Foodland site. Instead, orders are taken a day or two in advance by phone or fax (590-2048), or by using the e-mail link at the Web site. More than half order by phone, Jackye Peacock said, but most of the remainder are e-mail customers. All can specify which store they prefer to use; a 17 percent surcharge is added to the bill for the shopping and delivery service.

It's worth the price to people like Beth Evans, a Honolulu woman whose physical disability makes it difficult to go up and down stairs in the three-story walkup apartment building where she lives.

"And I would have to take a taxi to the store, because I can no longer take the bus," Evans said. "It adds up to more than the 17 percent."

The Peacocks now work almost exclusively at this business (Jackye does have a part-time evening job) and are its sole employees.

"What I've noticed about this business, it's definitely for the hard worker," Jackye Peacock said. "It's not super profitable. We're out to make a living. The main reason to start this business was to find more time to be at home. We just want to pay our rent and pay for food."

Peacock said most of her regular customers are elderly or infirm, but some are simply working professionals who like the convenience or even stay-at-home moms who will sacrifice something else for the luxury of avoiding shopping with their small children in tow.

"It's definitely a change in culture or habit," she added. "The ones who use us are hooked."

Getting people hooked, however, appeared to be the problem for Sheets, who had to make enough to pay the two drivers she employed for deliveries (she maintained her nursing job throughout the life of Online Grinds).

"People that did use the service, they said they preferred going to the store themselves; that was the biggest thing I heard," Sheets said. "They wanted to pick out their own things ... I just couldn't make it go."

"What I find is the big ... (online services) on the Mainland, like Webvan and Peapod, they've really taken a dive," she added. "In that respect I didn't feel so bad."

Reach Vicki Viotti at vviotti@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8053.