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They prefer the world delivered to their door
12:35 AM EDT on Monday, April 16, 2007
By G. Wayne Miller, Journal Staff Writer
Providence Journal
Nancy Thomas rarely has to leave her Cranston home, choosing to order most
items online,
including groceries, and have them delivered...
The Providence Journal / John Freidah
CRANSTON -- One's home has long been one's castle, but life behind the walls
has never been so inviting. Thanks to the modern marketplace, whose laws are
written by human behavior, it is now possible to live at a level of comfort
and convenience that medieval royalty could never have imagined.
Consider Nancy Thomas, mother of two, dedicated online shopper, self-described
e-mail junkie and loyal customer of Netflix and Peapod, the home-delivery
grocery service run by Stop & Shop's parent company.
Sitting in her living room next to her home-entertainment center -- stereo,
high-definition TV, DVD and CD players, Cox Cable box -- Thomas describes a
lifestyle that, those who follow such trends assert, is increasingly common.
"A good weekend," says Thomas, "is here."
Not that the 53-year-old never leaves her house, near Garden City. She does
-- sometimes for a movie, a dinner with friends or for boutique shopping. She
takes day trips and visits New York. But modern technology and creative
entrepreneurship can send more and more of the world out there into her home,
giving her choices she never had before.
Once upon a time -- five years ago, say -- Thomas would get into her car,
drive to a grocery store and proceed shelf-by-shelf and aisle-by-aisle,
filling her cart with necessities for her family and their cat, Bella. She
would endure a checkout line, perhaps bag her own groceries, then load
everything into her car for unpacking back at the house.
She hated it.
"The milk and bread and all that kind of stuff -- it drives me nuts" she says.
No more.
These days, she goes online (on one of her family's four computers) and
selects her groceries at the Peapod site. Every week, a truck pulls into her
drive with her order.
"They're terrific. They come in and deliver it right to the kitchen."
Titles from Netflix arrive in Thomas's mailbox and movies are available on
demand from Cox with a few clicks of the remote. Thomas reads books -- most
bought online, even though, as she observes, "you can see Borders from my
house!" There's always home-delivered pizza, of course. She looked into a
dry-cleaning firm that picks up and delivers. It was expensive -- but she
might have been tempted if she didn't have a daughter in high school who has a
new license and is happy to run errands. (Her other daughter is a sophomore at
the University of Rhode Island.)
Thomas works from home as a public-relations and communications consultant.
But until recently, she worked long hours at a hospital -- and the best time
of her day, she says, frequently was when she returned home, often at 8 p.m.
or later.
"I was in a suit every day -- suit, heels, the whole bit," she says. "I
couldn't wait to get in the door. It wasn't just the physical exhaustion -- it
was the mental exhaustion. It was the beeper, the cell phone, the computer all
day long."
Whether working in it or away from it, Thomas says, home means "comfort."
TREND SPOTTERS maintain that a variety of factors coinciding with advances in
technology have helped create the new homebodies. With Amber alerts, bird flu
and the continuing effects of 9/11, the world outside the front door can seem
more dangerous.
The recent deaths and illnesses of thousands of dogs and cats from tainted
pet food were a vivid reminder of the new age of risk, says Marian Salzman,
executive vice president and chief marketing officer of advertising agency JWT
Worldwide, and author of several books, most recently Next Now: Trends for the
Future.
"There's a great deal of retreating into ourselves," Salzman says. With so
much beyond individual control -- add pet food now to the list -- some people
have come to believe "the only environment that I can program completely is my
living room," Salzman says.
April Masini, author and advice columnist says: "It used to be fashionable to be out and about, but after herpes, AIDS and
STDs made the sexual freedom of the '60s a far-and-distant memory, behavior
modified and everyone started spending more time where it was safe -- at home.
"In fact, the home itself has changed. Now, more houses have kitchens that
open into family rooms so that the family living spaces are more featured than
ever before. Martha Stewart and other living room entrepreneurs became
multimillionaires because they were onto something new and the Food Network
took off like never before. People want more of what they used to get out, in."
Says Nancy O'Reilly, clinical psychologist, author, and founder of the
WomenSpeak Project, an online women's resource group: "There's a world out
there that presents a lot of tough issues. Busy people have busy lives. When
the opportunity arises to finally go back to the home port people are going,
'Ah!' It's a matter of reconnecting."
PEAPOD has benefited from the trend, with sales rising some 20 percent over
the past year in those Northeast and Midwest markets where the service is
available, according to spokeswoman Peg Merzbacher. Peapod, which offers many
of the same products found in a Stop & Shop store, has some 270,000 customers
and continues to grow, Merzbacher says.
The smaller, East Providence-based Munroe Dairy is also experiencing growth,
says general manager Andrew Yaghjian: having added about 1,000 accounts in the
last year, it now has nearly 12,000 customers. The company offers traditional
home delivery of dairy products -- and now, meat, vegetables, juice, desserts
and more, with new items being added. Munroe delivery people, who drive those
distinctive cow-themed trucks, will even rotate the stock in your refrigerator.
Los Gatos, Calif.-based Netflix, which began offering subscriptions in 1999,
is seeing more explosive growth: 6.3 million subscribers last year (up 51
percent over 2005) and 2006 revenue of $277.2 million (up 44 percent),
according to the company's latest annual report. Netflix offers more than
75,000 DVD titles and its catchy radio ads boast of more than a billion DVDs
having been mailed.
"We live in a world that is increasingly convenience-centric," says Ted
Sarandos, chief content officer for Netflix. "People are managing their time
and valuing their leisure time more than ever."
THOMAS WELCOMED a reporter into her home and followed up with one of her
favorite forms of communication: an
e-mail.
"Forgot to talk [more] about all the online shopping, too," she wrote. "As I
sit here, I see that my lamps both came from online, the magazine I'm writing
for, all the books on my table, even the rug in the study. Most of the clothes
I'm wearing. One-hundred percent of my holiday gifts -- for many years now!
"Just ordered my daughter's clothes for her birthday next week -- from
Victoria's Secret -- which, again, you can almost see from my house. I find
the convenience terribly freeing. I still enjoy boutique shopping and
specialty gourmet food shopping and fine jewelry browsing -- but I have never
walked the entire Providence Place mall or Warwick Mall."
Some links from people and sites in this story:
"I was in a suit every day -- suit, heels, the whole bit.
I couldn't wait to get in the door. It wasn't just the physical exhaustion --
it was the mental exhaustion."
NANCY THOMAS, gwmiller@projo.com
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