Streamline.com

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

~ the obit ~

in 1993 turkey did not have the broadband to imagine online grocery delivery. ankara houses did not have basements that would accept a six-foot refrigerated locker, and the corner manav delivered by motorcycle anyway. streamline.com was a suburban-boston experiment that solved a logistics problem american two-income households in westwood, massachusetts actually had, and then got broken by the same capital cycle that broke every other dot-com grocery service.

tim demello founded streamline in 1993, six years before the company stuck a dot-com on the end of its name. the model was unusual: a $30 monthly subscription that bought you weekly grocery delivery into a refrigerated box bolted to the wall of your basement or garage. you did not need to be home for delivery. you came home and the milk was already chilling in the box. streamline also picked up your dry cleaning and your unwatched movie rentals on the same run. fast company wrote it up in 1996 as the future of household chores.

the ipo arrived in june 1999 at the peak of the dot-com window. shares opened at $10, the company raised $45 million in fresh capital, and the press treated it as one of the safer e-commerce bets because the unit economics on a recurring subscription with a delivery box installed in the customer's house actually looked defensible. it was not selling pet food at a loss. it was selling a service customers paid in advance for.

that math did not hold. for the six months ending july 1 2000 streamline lost $23 million. the stock dropped under $3. capital markets had stopped funding any internet retailer regardless of model. on november 22 2000 demello announced full shutdown, telling reporters the company had thoroughly exhausted all options after months of discussions with potential strategic and financial partners. the basement boxes stopped getting refilled. customers were left with a sealed refrigerated locker bolted to their wall and an unanswered phone line.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the basement box ~

the hardware was the part everyone remembered. streamline installed a custom unit at every signup, called the streamline box. it was a small refrigerator with a frozen section and a dry-storage cabinet above it, plus a return slot for the dry cleaning on the side. delivery drivers had a key. the unit consumed a couple hundred dollars of customer-side installation cost that streamline ate as customer acquisition.

this was the move that made streamline different from webvan or homegrocer. those services were warehouses and trucks. streamline was the same plus a permanent customer-side asset bolted to a wall. when the company shut down, the boxes stayed. there are westwood homeowners who pulled streamline boxes out of their basements as late as 2015 during renovations.

~ the funny part ~

the streamline model is what amazon fresh and walmart+ are trying to do now, a quarter-century later. weekly recurring delivery on a subscription, with no need to be home. the part everyone missed in 2000 was that the model was correct. the part everyone got right was that the capital cycle was wrong. you cannot fund a national grocery-delivery network out of dot-com ipo money, and 1999 venture capital did not have the patience for a slow eight-year expansion through the boston suburbs.

~ the long tail ~

tim demello went back to private investing after streamline. he was later associated with several boston-area startups, including a coffee delivery service that did not become household news. the streamline.com domain got picked up by another company entirely. the original brand has no surviving presence on the web. the closest spiritual successor is amazon fresh, which started 2007 and only became a real national service after the whole foods acquisition in 2017, which is roughly the timeline streamline would have needed had the 2000 capital window stayed open.

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