Damn. It feels kind of weird to be thinking about the "good old days" already. It's too soon, I'm too young :)

The problem with Kozmo, and the reason they died off is that their business model had huge holes in it. Aside from the insane fees they paid for movie drop-offs, the real problem was that they had no minimum for delivery.

That means if you wanted a donut delivered it cost them the same thing as if you had ordered two movies and five books.

They lost a fortune on all those $5 orders that required $30 couriers to deliver.

They had a minimum for delivery when I used it in Seattle. Perhaps that was not allways the case. But if pizza delivery is profitable I don't see why Kozmo could not be done profitably if the costs were contained.

Ah...the days of kozmo, we miss them too.

You should rent the story of kozmo, I think the documentary was called "e-dreams" and you are all right: they failed because of the stupid starbucks deal, no min delivery fees and they tried to expand to quickly (pizza works because they have like a 5 mile radius to serve, not whole cities). Oh, and now you can rent it from http://www.mercurydvd.com/ Mercury DVD which delivers DVDs in Seattle now (for reasonable prices and a mail option). We do netflix as we live on vashon, but oh how we LOVED kozmo...

Man I can't believe I used to pull down 42k downloading songs all day on napster and whipping up a layout template and a banner ad or two a day. I wonder what happened? Oh yeah, they were paying people 42k to do just that. Still the free bagels and soda were nice. I think pretty much everyone working in the bubble knew it was temporary, though.

Reading the bit about Jetsons reminds me that they're featuring in an advertising campaign for Broadband in NZ.

This is really weird. I was riding out from work yesterday, when a guy on a bicycle (I was on a motorcycle) with a Kosmo delivery bag on kept racing up and through the red lights. I had a little thought that he was going to get run over and go splat just like Kosmo did.

You should come to the Toronto area.
http://grocerygateway.com/
Grocery Gateway is alive and well here, and they've actually been *expanding* over the last couple of years. I don't use it myself, but it was a god send back when I was working over at an office -- they'd bring loads of Coca-Cola, Rice Crispies, and beer (!) right to our fridge.

Well I would not mind at all living in Canada. Sort of proves my theory that Dot Com buisnesses can be done to turn a profit if costs are controlled

You miss Kozmo?!? You wouldn't *believe* how much we miss Kozmo.
My husband Sean was a manager for the Bellevue location (the ONLY profitable location in the company, thank you). Now he's working at a bloody Kinko's making about 2/3 the salary.
He would bring home day old Briazz sandwiches and a DVD and a Ben & Jerry's bar.
MAN I miss that place. It was an admin assistant's dream. When your friend was having a bad day you could have a CD and a Simpson's video delivered in an hour. Or Pasta & Co soup for a sick friend. Or lunches delivered for a business meeting.
*sigh*
Sean still has about 10 t-shirts and some jackets, and a CASE of post-it notes with the logo. They went overboard with the uniforms and logo stuff.
I'm sad now.

Hey I would love a Kozmo t-Shirt.

Consider yourselves lucky. I live in Birmingham, Alabama. The black hole of anything that is technical and cool.

It is better to love and lost than to not love at all.

-Dave

I worked at kozmo in Atlanta. I'm in L.A. now and I could've sworn I saw the Kozmo van on Sunset yesterday. It brought back so many memories. That was the greatest job I've ever had. Where else can you get paid well above minimum wage, get 1 dollar extra per delivery, and get tips? They provided us with video games, a foos ball table, 25c sodas, a tv, and didn't require us to do anything if there were no orders. It was heaven. And when we shut down they sold us computers for $150.00, the foos ball table went for $50.00, and we got all vacation day, sick day, and 2 weeks worth of regular pay all at once. I still have my kozmo t- shirts, sweatshirts, and the bags we used to keep frozen things frozen. In atlanta we also had the kozmo car. A bright orange ford focus with the green kozmo guy on it. I used to drive that thing all the time. Somebody(not me) finally ended up wrecking it and that was the end of that.

They had the cars here in Seattle. It is a bloody shame.

The IP of 209.152.49.111 did not leave a real email address.

now that there are way more people online, and there's blackberries, ipaq's, tungstens, iphones etc. sending and receiving email and various other web services...i think somebody should take another shot at it. maybe what was ahead of its time then, would be right on time about now. because i'm pretty sure i could make a million bucks in one week just doing it myself on foot in capitol hill. i'm just too damn lazy............