Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

Yeah, I find it a more than a little troubling too. I have been waiting for PD to start servicing atlata forever. I miss webvan, though zifty.com has restored my "Kozmo" service recently.

One day someone will have to explain to me why people close down profitable businesses. I mean, I understand there can be lower than desirable profits, but jeez, if you are making money at it, especially in this economy, it seems like closing costs would cost you so much that any freed capital would be better left in the business.

Good luck to you and Yedvarb and the PD team.

You guys make a great point that I missed, I wanted to order some damn groceries online too. Been looking forward to it for a long time, and now will have to wait longer, dammit.

I dont understand closing something making money either. Just to clarify though, the coprorate office, aka where I worked, was not part of the numbers that made the distribution center "profitable", it was "4 wall profitable" meaning it paid for itself and made money above that. We would have had to of replicated that in several other distribution centers to cover the cost of the corporate office. So I guess that cost (56 employees, office, so on) they decided was too great or something, but it still makes no sense to me because we DID accomplish profitability and prove this could work and we had thousands of loyal customers, Publix has really alienated a lot of people with this move.

Yeah overall I think Publix is a pretty well run company, I must admit. But they are pretty backward thinking and pretty old school. What I mean by that is bascially conservative. I still think that a more current outlook and approach, more contemporary company, would have kept PublixDirect around because they would have had the foresight to see that this business is just a little ahead of its time, but its not a bad business.

Its a service that customers LOVE and its PROFITABLE when you do it right (it wasnt easy to get to profitability per dist center, but PublixDirect did accomplish that).

Publix has really pissed off customers with this move. We have heard from customers whom vow to never set foot in a Publix store again BECAUSE they closed PublixDirect and said customers never knew they were part of an "experiment" as the closing press relase called it.

The stock price has held its own even over the last few rough economy years. However, the closing of PD is said to be going to have an 18M quarterly revenue affect on Publix. That wont help.

Also, Publix is a private company, no can buy the stock.

I used PDirect sometimes before it died. I have fast broadband but the site was very very slow. Slow enough to drive you crazy. (And it crashed sometimes too.) I buy $250+ worth of food a week to feed a family. It takes an hour and half in the store. That's how long it took online. So I saved travel time -- 10 minutes each way -- and paid delivery charges. Not a big winner unless my days were very jammed.

There was no visible advertising in this market. And certainly none in the stores. The product selection started out very limited, but it was improving. By the time PD died it had gotten to about the minimum it needed to be.

The product search feature was laughable. They built their own and it was very picky - leave out the first word in product name, get nothing. No suggestions if you mis-typed. They should have used something more google-like. But I think they rolled their own, which was an error.

Some product descriptions, especially for the meat, made it really hard to figure out how much you were going to get. Also, for some products, e.g. chicken breasts, they would give you a weight range. That's fine if you are buying one -- but what if you are buying eight? Then the weight range becomes several portions, so you risk buying way too little or way too much.

Etc. Etc. Etc. The interface just wasn't very good.

Give them credit for superb ontime delivery and very polite and helpful delivery guys, though. I hope they find them other jobs -- they deserve them.

The Publix.com website is next to useless too. You can create a shopping list;--fine; but no prices are displayed! Why the heck can they not show all the produce on line with the price, so that we can know exactly what is going to cost us when we go to their store?

At the moment they have a really retarded "create a shopping list" option. Basically, you add what you want to this stupid list, e.g. apples, grapes, etc. I can do that with "notepad" or the old-fashioned paper. Being conservative is fine; being plain stupid is not.

For a large store like Publix not having this facility is disgraceful!