Before the pandemic I would have made a Saturday-morning project of driving to Griggs Nursery to buy tomato plants and a variety of herbs such as basil, sage and parsley. The other day they arrived, no worse for the wear, in a carton from Amazon. Delivery was free, as it was for my bicycle seat cover and the 8.7-ounce bottle of Shout Advanced Ultra Concentrated Gel Set-In Stain Brush Laundry Stain Remover.
"The Wells Fargo Wagon is a comin' down the street," wrote Meredith Willson in his delightfully nostalgic tune from "The Music Man," recalling the composer's early years in rural Iowa. "It could be curtains, or dishes, or a double boiler . . ."
The other evening a young woman pulled up to our house in a blue Chevrolet Spark. She wore latex gloves and a surgical mask to provide a "no-contact delivery" from Dominos. I waved to her through the window and watched as she placed the pizza box on our doormat, retrieved the $5 tip I had left under a small stone, and wheeled her Spark toward the homes of other hungry shelterers.
NPR had a story recently about South Mountain Creamery in Middleton, Md., where the milk-delivery business is booming. The owner, Tony Brusco, says his drivers are making nearly 10,000 deliveries each week, with another 6,000 customers on a waiting list. He says he hopes some of them will stick with the program when the pandemic ends.
I have vivid childhood memories of watching the truck from Emmadine Farms lurch up our driveway in Westchester County, N.Y., water pouring out the back of the step van as the ice keeping products cold melted. In those pre-Amazon, pre-coronavirus days, home delivery was common. The food market in town delivered our groceries, the hardware store delivered dry goods and, of course, the brown UPS truck was omnipresent, with packages from Sears and other department stores.
Like Tony the Maryland dairyman, I wonder how much of this will last. In 2019 parcel service was expanding, with 10.6 billion business-to-home deliveries recorded that year. According to an estimate published in Barron's, the total could climb to 19.5 billion by 2025.
At the start of the pandemic I was so eager to stock up on protective equipment that I scoured Amazon's site for hand sanitizer and wound up ordering the only thing in stock, a product called Beauty New. It arrived at our door a week later—by China Post, direct from Shenzhen, about 680 miles from Wuhan.
In Phase 2 I may rethink parts of my delivery strategy.
(c) Peter Funt. This column originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal.
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