For those of us who are on our third DWI conviction, and have no one to buy our food stamps from us, comes a Netflix-like service by C-list grocery chain Stop & Shop: Peapod.
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Peapod's original name was IPOD, an acronym for 'Information and Product on Demand.' Then the owners threw away their winning lottery ticket while creating their business cards, when they changed the name to Peapod on a whim. Somewhere, Steve Jobs is laughing maniacally (and trying to ward off hepatic failure).
Peapod, birthed in 1989 by Andrew and Thomas Parkinson, the inventors of Michael J. Fox Disease, provides an on-line grocery shopping service in partnership with Stop & Shop.
"I thought it was one more aspect of my life I could outsource," said Miel Maryanna, who used a $20.00 coupon to experience Peapod's incredible suckiness. "On my first use, Peapod cancelled my order without notification after I sat here all day waiting and now we're in the middle of a blizzard."
"Our goal for Peapod is to make it exactly like your shopping experience in one of our Stop&Shop stores," said John Rishton, CEO of Stop & Shop's parent company, the Amsterdam-based Ahold Naamloze Vennootschap, which translates to 'entire store smells like rotting cabbage'.
"We know what our customers expect from Stop & Shop, and we will deliver nothing less," continued Rishton, speaking from A-Hole's corporate headquarters, located 4,134 miles from the nearest Stop & Shop store.
Their business model with Peapod is simple; you can shop online anytime of the day or night, they hand-select the best merchandise for you, leaving the crappy produce for those idiots who actually come to our stores, and we eventually deliver it to your front door. Well, most of it. They almost always forget something.
Many customers are not pleased with Peapod.
"Their customer service is terrible, but what choice do I have," said one user. "I used to hate Peapod, until I realized it is just like shopping in Oregon Trail - minus pelts, gunpowder and marauding Indians.
They insist, however, that they go out of their way to give customers a unique experience.
* They are not priced competitively with grocery stores. Customers say that spending more money for the same sh-t their neighbors are buying makes them feel like a rich Hollywood celebrity, and that's a lot of fun.
* The meat they sell isn't fit to feed a dog. They want you to remember that their brick-and-mortar stores are still a great vaue, so selling Beagle-meat at $11.50 a pound gives customers incentive to come visit them.
* Sale items are total bullsh-t. Wait, I mean 'temporarily out of stock'. They typically wait until the order is delivered to tell customers that they've replaced the ordered sale items with more expensive or smaller items. What are the customers going to do, complain to the driver?
* They price fresh produce by the PIECE, instead of by the pound. All of the corporate executives agree that they like it better when a customer pays the same amount for a single apple, when it's the same price as a whole pound of apples.
