A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, we had a milkman. Johnny the Milkman. Never John, or Johnny, or Mr. Connor. He was always and ever known by his full title: “Johnny the Milkman.”We’d spot him making a delivery and run down the street to meet his truck. Johnny the Milkman had a great boxy vehicle without passenger seats, and with both sliding doors left open to catch the summer breeze. A huge block of ice melting in the middle of the truck’s floor was ostensibly placed to keep cold the glass bottles of milk and cream.
Johnny the Milkman, in the days before OSHA and seatbelts and common sense, would let us jump on board and dangle our arms and legs out the passenger door for a few stops, dragging our Keds on the road as we drove from house to house. Then, to complete the nightmare for our mothers, he’d give us an ice pick and we’d chip off a handful of cold, crunchy microbes to chew on.
There's nothing like a seven-year-old with an ice pick, dangling his legs out of a moving truck. We loved it.
Every house in the neighborhood had a metal, slightly warped and poorly insulated milkbox on the back steps. (The cover could be removed with some effort and used for home plate when necessary. The box itself was most excellent for blowing up firecrackers.) Long before the Web or municipal recycling programs, our mothers would communicate with Johnny the Milkman by taping a note to the box, or to the empty milk bottles ready to be sanitized and reused, saying “Only one quart of milk this week but two dozen eggs please.”
It was a brilliant and failsafe way to insure Six Sigma delivery quality.
Not only did we receive a weekly visit from Johnny the Milkman, but Mr. Stafford-the-Fish-Man would come every Friday. His truck was full of fresh fish on ice, and my mother would pick out what she wanted and Mr. Stafford-the-Fish-Man would fillet it on the spot. Selling fish on Fridays to the McMullens, O’Connells and Callahans of my neighborhood--with a looming Catholic church sitting at the end of the block—was the closest thing to target marketing the 1960s had.
And then, each week, we had a bakery truck visit as well. Eddie was a tougher customer than Johnny the Milkman, but if he was feeling charitable and we were looking particularly forlorn, he would break open a box of cupcakes with multi-color frosting.
This was possibly on the weeks that Eddie’s spoilage was good, but more likely when he was just hungry, too, and couldn’t wait for lunch.
I loved the old home delivery business model--good people came to our house every week with good stuff. It was part of the rhythm of growing up.
But then reality struck. A Cumberland Farms appeared down the street (imagine a store dedicated to selling milk!). Moms started working to support their kids, all of whom decided they had to go to college. Home delivery went the way of the drive-in movie (which morphed into the mall cinema) and the backyard (which morphed into the lawn).
If you had been sitting in a business strategy meeting in, say, 1975 or 1985, trying to argue for the re-emergence of the home delivery model, you would have been sent off to write the marketing plan for crystal radio sets. If you’d been arguing the point in 1995 or later, you might have raised hundreds of millions of dollars and lost it all.
It’s a funny thing about good ideas, though--it's hard to keep them down. Because now, it seems, home delivery is making a comeback.
There’s a Peapod truck that prowls our streets, dropping off groceries. There’s a Zoots truck that makes the dry cleaning run all over town. Last week my windshield cracked and the replacement was done in our driveway. Not bad.
Even the milkman is making a comeback. The Wall Street Journal recently tried four milk delivery services including Manhattan Milk, launched in April 2008 and featuring happy Amish cows, no rBST, short delivery routes, and a return to those eco-friendly glass bottles.
Maybe Manhattan Milk will even let you drag your Keds down 5th Avenue
Meanwhile, President Obama and his administration continue to closely watch Microsoft's Mobile Medicine Service, providing home visits by doctors aimed at “radical prevention.” Having a doctor visit your home won’t take you back to the 1960s (like Johnny the Milkman)--it’ll take you back to the 1930s.
See what I mean about keeping good ideas down?
In a world of high energy prices, more telecommuting, an emphasis on outsourcing, and perhaps even a growing movement to trade work for time, home delivery could be the thing of the future.
There’s one home delivery service I’d like to see, the one you get in good hotels where you return from a business dinner and your bed has been turned-down and a chocolate placed on the pillow. A cupcake from Eddie was pretty special in the old days, but if you ever hear about this “turn down with chocolate” service, please let me know.
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