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  3. When veterans of the last dotcom boom name companies that symbolize the excesses of the late 1990s, they invariably include Webv

When veterans of the last dotcom boom name companies that symbolize the excesses of the late 1990s, they invariably include Webv

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问题     When veterans of the last dotcom boom name companies that symbolize the excesses of the late 1990s, they invariably include Webvan and Kozmo. com in their lists. Both promised to make it easy and cheap for people to order goods online and have them delivered swiftly. And both failed spectacularly after they discovered just how hard it is to make money trying to deliver on tight deadlines.
    Now, three online giants that survived the dotcom bust are trying to succeed where those two firms failed. Amazon is leading the charge. It has launched Amazon Fresh, a same-day delivery service, in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle. "Place your order by 10 a. m. and have it by dinner," it boasts. The service, which offers a selection of over 500,000 items including perishables such as milk and eggs, delivers its wares in green vans.
    Google and eBay are in the vanguard too. Google Shopping Express offers same-day delivery in the San Francisco Bay Area, as does eBay now, which is also available in Chicago, Dallas and New York. The two firms are in partnership with big retail chains and smaller local shops, which hold stock that they can tap into.
    Delivery startups such as Instacart and Postmates are also working closely with retailers to avoid the fate of Webvan, which wasted a fortune building its own warehouses. Instacart, which focuses on groceries, relies on "personal shoppers" who use their own vehicles to collect and deliver goods. An Instacart smartphone app tells them which shops to visit, what to pick up and where to take it. Working out delivery schedules and routes is "a really challenging data-science problem", explains Apoorva Mehta, the firm’s boss and a former Amazon employee.
    Sofa-bound shoppers now have a host of options. In San Francisco, Amazon offers a 30-day free trial of Amazon Fresh, after which customers pay $299 for a year’s membership. Members get free shipping on orders of more than $35. In Seattle, there is no annual fee, but orders worth less than $100 incur charges. Google Shopping Express, which has a much smaller selection of wares, is offering a six-month free trial while it decides what to charge; and Instacart gives customers various options, including a $3. 99 fee for delivery in less than two hours and an Amazon-like $99 annual membership that eliminates fees on orders worth more than $35.
    Your correspondent placed orders with all three of the big online firms, and everything turned up on time and in good condition. There were only minor problems. His Google order came in two separate deliveries. And it was difficult to find details on Amazon Fresh’s web page of how a dissatisfied customer could avoid incurring the $299 fee at the end of a trial period.
    Most competitors in the same-day business are focusing on cities with lots of rich consumers prepared to pay for time-saving services. But turning a profit will still not be easy. Andrew Schmahl of Strategy&, a consulting firm, says a survey of 1,000 American online shoppers it conducted last year showed most were reluctant to pay anywhere near enough to cover the cost of speedy deliveries. That may explain why other retailers have been hesitant to enter the business.

选项
答案F
解析 根据Instacart and Postmates定位到第四段。该段首句指出：Delivery startups such as Instacart and Postmates are also working closely with retailers to avoid the fate of Webvan, which wasted a fortune building its own warehouses. “像Instacart和Postmates这样的新兴快递公司也在与零售商密切合作，避免重蹈Webvan公司的覆辙。”与该句表达接近的是选项F：cooperated with local shops and learned lessons from others“与当地商店合作，并从其他公司那里吸取教训”。
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