For us it was basically trying to look at the future. We were actually in a conference where they were talking about trends. They were saying that grocery shopping online would have 10% of the market share within five years. This was back in 1995. As I said before, margins are 2%. If I lose 10% of my volume, I'm done, I'm out of business. My model does not work.
So we basically did it as a necessity, and did everything we could to get there. We took students from McGill who were trying to do an end-of-year project to build a website. We basically scaled it from nothing. We ended up featuring, or sending press releases to get the media to come in. Ottawa, at the time, was the hub of JDS and Nortel and everything else. And we launched. We basically launched deliveries one day a week. We got absolutely over and done; the requests were unbelievable. But we developed something and believed in it; we never gave up.
A lot of people were saying that it was not going to work. Even our competitors, our big boys, were saying that it does not work, that it does not make sense. For us, it does. And it continues to do so. It gives us credibility. It gives us access to customers. It builds loyalty. It allows us to serve a need in the community without increasing our overhead. And that's the key. For us, it's to reach more customers, increase our revenue stream, while keeping our overhead in check. That's the motivation.
Thank you.