WEBVAN DELIVERIES LACKED HUMAN TOUCH CYBER SHOPPING FAILS AS SOCIAL CONTACT.

Byline: Joseph Honig

IT started out as such a good idea that many, if not most, cyber-age pundits believed it to be a sure thing: millions of computer-literate citizens booting up, clicking on and ordering everything from cucumbers to cornflakes from an online delivery service instead of enduring that most American of inventions - the supermarket.

Well, after two years, $800 million lost and a couple of thousand pink slips, the experiment called Webvan - the electronic grocery store - filed for bankruptcy a few days ago, proving, at least for the time being, that most of us don't want to live in a virtual world.

We want to get out, squeeze a melon, maybe a roll of toilet paper, and see things besides icons and tool bars and flashing colors on a TV screen.

In the end, Webvan, like so many of its dot-com colleagues, wound up selling dollars for 80 cents, boasting of its 750,000 customers but unable to make a nickel in profit.

Yes, it had a lot of people logging on for lasagna. But like electronic retailer Amazon.com, there were never enough shoppers to keep red ink off balance sheets.

How could American business go so wrong? How could a once high-flying Wall Street play - Webvan's stock crashed to 6 cents from a high of $36 - fall like an overdone souffle?

The answer to those questions, I believe, is that the majority of us don't want our worlds centered inside quietly humming metal boxes, even though their hard drives and bytes and bits make so many, many tasks more palatable than in B.E. - Before Internet - times.

We want some social commerce, interaction with others sharing this mortal coil. Maybe some conversation. Maybe a chance to bump into that unknown someone who might share our lives.

We want to see things that aren't fashioned from thousands of pixels into vaguely familiar reminders of what lies outside our doors.

How crazy was Webvan, this notion of strolling virtual aisles, forking over one's Visa number and then waiting for a truck bearing bananas?

Just talk to anyone - anyone - from Burma or Britain or Bosnia who happens to be visiting these welcoming shores. They will tell you without hesitation that American supermarkets are among the most stupefying, most compelling - not to mention bountiful - visions they have ever seen. To many tourists, they beat television hands down. Some visitors bring cameras. They go home in awe.

Because in all truth, our grocery stores work exceedingly well. They are not banks with overworked, surly and disappearing tellers. They are not specialty stores with often sullen, ill-informed clerks. They are not the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Mostly, you are in and out in a half-hour or less. You exercise. You see what you are getting. You greet people you don't really know but who, in the ways of routine commerce, become parts of your life. Simply put, virtual anything will never replace smells or sounds or a stranger's smile.

For the conceit, the fatal flaw, in our dance with the digital is this proposition that so many of us will do anything to escape the ordinary, the mundane and time-consuming errands of everyday life. What so many M.B.A.s fail to grasp, however, is that taking one's kids to the bookstore, the mall, the auto dealership is itself part of living. We make these journeys as families, as friends, as partners in spending what we've worked for.

Sure, there are battalions of Hollywood and Fortune 500 types whose social agendas don't allow time to buy tires. So they'll log on. Or their assistants will strike keyboards in search of fountain pens or flowers or whatever passes for thank-you gifts of the moment.

But Webvan, unless it successfully reorganizes, has come and gone like so many experiments in high-tech marketing. You simply cannot build a lot of businesses on the principle of making people prisoners in their own homes. Though, in all fairness, some do exist and prosper. The almost prehistoric Sears catalog never failed to bring timely merchandise to faraway towns.

These computers of ours, these modern-day Merlins, can do thousands of great works, everything from managing bureaucracies to writing important books to creating the next generations of spacecraft. They cannot now - or in the foreseeable future - help us judge when a cantaloupe is ripe.

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Online grocer Webvan filed for bankruptcy last week, proving, at least for the time being, that most of us don't want to live in a virtual world.

Ben Margot/Associated Press