Manhattan Grocery Wars and the High Cost of Parking

Peapod will now delivery groceries in Manhattan. They will compete with Fresh Direct and are ready to pay lots of parking tickets:

Mr. McHugh acknowledged that Peapod had budgeted twice as much money to pay parking tickets — the scourge of grocery deliverers — in Manhattan as it had for other cities it operates in, like Boston and Washington. But he would not say how much that was.

As Peg Merzbacher, Peapod’s director of marketing, put it: “You have to sell a lot of cans of peas to cover one parking ticket.” She said the company would have two workers in each truck so that one could move it if a ticket agent arrived.