Our intrepid reporter sits at home and tests Kozmo, HomeGrocer, and other Web-based deliveries.

If you live in a big city, there are scads of ways to order food online and have it delivered while you stay inside. This may sound like old news: Chinese delivery has been around since the Paleolithic. But this is different. Groceries, meals, snacks, and beer are all on the menu, and the process requires even less effort and human contact: no phone call, and in some cases, no tipping. You simply go to a Web site, check off the items you want, type in a credit-card number (your own, ideally), and wait for victuals to appear at your door. But be warned. Venture capital is drying up fast, and many of these companies have gone under recently. So, if you want to cash in on the deals they're handing out to attract new customers ($20 of free groceries, free delivery, etc.), now is the time to get in gear.

What companies are still standing? In my city (Seattle), Kozmo.com, HomeGrocer.com, and Albertsons.com are still in business. Peapod.com, NetGrocer.com, and Webvan are big players elsewhere. (Click for a sampling of other services.) There are also tons of smaller regional businesses such as PDQuick, SanDiegoGrocer, and WhyRunOut. How do all these places differ, and which is the best?

Kozmo.com is a stoner's dream. With videos, music, and an entire section labeled "munchies," it is essentially a classy convenience store plus video store that comes to your door. For the purposes of this article, though, I'm going to stick with their food offerings.

Selection: A smattering of staples such as milk, bagels, yogurt, and dry pasta are available, but the main focus of the selection is snacks, drinks, and meals. The meals are upscale and quite good—lasagna, salads, sandwiches, frozen pizza, heat-and-serve pasta. Same goes for the snacks: Odwalla Bars, Ben & Jerry's ice cream, chips, and a selection of healthy stuff such as nuts and Power Bars. As for drinks, Kozmo's got juice, soda, beer, and wine. To buy booze, you must show ID when the delivery guy arrives (other sites work the same way). Plus, you can adjust the settings so that no alcohol or tobacco products even show up on the site, or if they do show up, you have to type in a password to buy them.

Ease of Use: The site is well designed and organized, and I had no trouble finding what I was looking for. Plus, the site remembers your credit-card info so you don't have to enter it each time you visit. On the downside, there's no nutritional information for the products.

Delivery: They deliver within an hour of ordering, or you can select a one-hour window in the future. I received four of the five orders I placed within the first half-hour of the expected delivery time. Delivery is free. (Correction: As of Dec. 1, Kozmo started charging for delivery: $1.99 for all orders under $30; for orders above that it's free.)

Price: Kozmo also charges more than your grocery store does. It's not as bad as an airport snack shack charging $5 for bottled water, but judging from a random sampling of a dozen food products, the average markup was 14 percent. Depending on your outlook and the depth of your laziness, this may or may not be worth the convenience of having it show up at your door. See the for more details.

Tipping: The Web site says, "although not expected, tipping is allowed for service above and beyond Kozmo's high standards." A representative of the company pointed out to me that unlike your average bike messenger, kozmonauts (as the delivery folks are known) get an hourly wage, benefits, and some even have stock options, so it's really up to the customer. Noticing the slight lingering of the delivery guys at my door after the product handoff, I asked if most people tipped, and they said yes.

Reliability: I had two beefs here. First of all, most of the desirable meals (salads especially) are sold out by dinner time each day. If the point of the service is to allow you to be a complete sloth, planning ahead for dinner should not be required. Second, the lag time between running out of a product and showing the product as "sold out" on the site is long enough that on two occasions Kozmo had to call me up after I'd completed and confirmed my order to let me know something I'd asked for was unavailable.

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