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Welcome to the first annual Verge Hack Week. We're totally blowing up our site: we've given our reporters and editors the entire week to play with new tools and experiment with new storytelling ideas, while members of our amazing product team have gathered in New York to help build all sorts of interesting new things. Learn more.


Twenty years ago last week, Phil Brandenberger paid $12.48 plus shipping for Sting's album "Ten Summoners' Tales." He was the first person to buy something on the internet. In his honor, I fired up Spotify and searched for the album. Before you can say "Fields of Gold is a masterpiece you seriously don't know what you're talking about," I'd ordered a phone charger, a dozen eggs, some underwear, a bunch of cupcakes, and a six-pack of beer. I ordered it on the internet. And it's all going to be here in the next few minutes.

Two decades into online shopping, same-day delivery is the next frontier, at least in densely populated urban areas like New York City. (Bringing quick and varied delivery options anywhere else is going to be an entirely other challenge.) This is how Amazon and others think they'll kill brick-and-mortar stores once and for all, bringing you the convenience and pants-free experience of online shopping right alongside the immediate gratification of buying something in a store. Amazon, Google, eBay, and countless startups of all sizes are competing to see who can get to your door first. Even Uber is in on it — and it won’t be the last to try.

Thanks to Seamless, delivery food is already a (mission-critical) part of urban life. What if that could be extended to everything? What if I could have someone wade into the terrifying morass of the Brooklyn Target to get me a shirt for my date tonight, or track down some camembert before my parents get here? What if it only took six taps on my phone's screen?

That's the plan. Can anyone pull it off? To find out, I ordered from them all. The goal: to see how fast "same-day delivery" really is.