An Insider's View Of Webvan

from the meltdown-Mondays dept

The San Jose Merc went out and spoke with a bunch of former Webvan employees to figure out where the company went wrong. There were a lot of reasons, but many seem like cliche dot com failure reasons. The management was more keen on opening up new markets with fancier and flashier features than they ever were on making sure that what they already had worked or (more importantly) was what the customer wanted. Apparently, that amazing $30 million factory broke down constantly, and could procoss about a third of the orders it was supposed to. My favorite stories (repeated by multiple former employees) were about how Webvan employees would have to hide their Webvan badges, run into local grocery stores, and pick up items that were missing from an order.

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