NetGrocer

» see netgrocer.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Groceries by courier is an idea that only makes sense in a country built for it. It needs cheap domestic parcel shipping and a supermarket far enough away to count as a chore. Turkey in the nineties had a bakkal at the end of the street and a man who would carry your water bottles up four flights for small change. i was not online until 1998 anyway, and when i got there i was not looking for detergent.

NetGrocer was founded in 1995 by Daniel Nissan and opened for orders about a year later, which the sources date to either 1996 or 1997 and which the archive first caught in June 1997. It stocked around seven thousand items, and the single rule that shaped the entire company was that none of them could be perishable. No milk, nothing out of the produce aisle. Cereal, detergent, diapers, canned goods, the half of a supermarket run that does not care how long it sits in a truck.

That one rule is why it lived. Everyone else in the category was building refrigerated fulfillment and their own delivery fleets, which is a capital problem that gets worse the more customers you win. NetGrocer had a single warehouse of about 130,000 square feet in North Brunswick, New Jersey, chosen for how close it sat to the FedEx hub at Newark, and it handed the hard part to a company that already owned planes.

~ the dossier ~

~ the one warehouse ~

Orders arrived in one to four business days, with most of the Northeast getting theirs by the second. That was slow by supermarket standards and it did not matter, because nobody ordering forty pounds of paper towels online needed them that afternoon. The company was in the replenishment business rather than the dinner business, and it had worked out that distinction years before the rest of the category did.

The online grocery class of 1999 read the same market and decided the opposite. Webvan raised over a billion dollars and built refrigerated distribution centers, and Kozmo promised to be at your door within the hour. Both were gone by the middle of 2001. NetGrocer was still shipping.

~ the listing that did not happen ~

On 31 July 1998 the company filed to raise thirty-eight million dollars on the Nasdaq under the ticker NTGR, with CIBC Oppenheimer leading it. It never priced. The offering was scrapped with market conditions given as the only reason, and the company said it would raise privately instead. Within weeks Daniel Nissan was gone as president and chief executive.

Frederick Horowitz, an original investor with a background in consumer products, took the job on an interim basis. The staff, which had been over sixty, was cut. Early reports of an eighty percent layoff were walked back after the company objected, and the real figure was never given out. This is normally the paragraph a dot-com grave ends on. NetGrocer's runs another eighteen years.

~ the long tail ~

It simply kept going, quietly, through the decade that killed the loud ones and then through the decade after that. By the middle of the 2010s the storefront was running on WordPress with a supermarket software vendor's analytics wired into it, still selling nonperishables, still shipping out of New Jersey.

Then it stopped. The last working capture of the store is 13 April 2016. By the first week of January 2017 the same address was serving a form saying the domain was available and inviting you to submit an inquiry. Company records mark it dead in October 2016, which fits the gap neatly. There was no press release and no last-orders date given to anybody. The address does not resolve at all in 2026.

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