House Calls : From Food to Fitness, You Name It and There’s Probably Someone Who Will Deliver It to You
For the trendy who “cocoon,” for the plebeians who play couch potato, for those too busy for the freeways or too angst- ridden to drive, life can be lived at home. The good life. The swell life. The I’m-OK-who-cares-about-you life.
Too tired to shop for groceries? Call Grocery Line, minimum order $50, fee 10% of the bill. Too flabby to show up in a gym? Call Body Sculpting. For $40 per 1-hour session, three times a week, payable a month in advance, Jeff Bathiany will bring his gym and exercise equipment in his van to your house. Too disheveled to go to the beauty parlor? No problem, Rendezvous Images will come to you.
In days of yore, the milkman delivered. The kid from the grocery store pedaled his bike to your door with your order. The doctor made house calls. Eventually, the milkman disappeared, though the guy from the pool service started coming by. The grocery store stopped delivering, and the gardener showed up instead. The doctor traded in the trusty black bag with a stethoscope and tongue depressor and stayed in the office with a million-dollar machine that diagnosed diseases almost before they were discovered. But people started delivering bottled water to your house.
Now, the pendulum is swinging back in Orange County--at least in neighborhoods where they eat Brie rather than Velveeta and drink wine from glasses instead of straight from a bottle wrapped in a brown bag.
“Our typical client has the money to spend on the car; they have a nice car, and they don’t have a lot of time to take care of it,” said Bruce Strysik, who owns a car “detailing” business. The average cost to a Strysik customer is $100 a month, for which the car is washed weekly and waxed and detailed monthly. Basically, a good detailing leaves a car looking better than when it left the showroom and features thorough vacuuming and loving attention to chrome, rubber, tires and wheels.
“I would say the majority of our customers have a Mercedes,” he said. “We of course will do any kind of car, but I would say we do more Mercedes than anything else.”
For the stay-at-homes who want good entertainment, there are sound engineers and audio-video suppliers like Greg Steffani, who works for a San Juan Capistrano company called Home Electronic Systems.
Steffani’s company is installing a $180,000 system in a house being built that will cost more than $4 million when it’s done. The system includes doors that open as people approach and close behind them, a specially designed column in a bathroom that swings around and unveils a TV, and a living room couch that pivots so people on one end of the L-shaped couch won’t have to look over their shoulders when a projector pops up from the floor, a screen comes down from the ceiling and the movie starts.
Steffani’s firm has also done jobs for $2,000. “Almost everything we do, somebody has a little something extra they want,” he said. Sometimes they want to control a downstairs videocassette recorder from an upstairs bedroom. Sometimes they want speakers in showers and saunas, or under water in the swimming pool.
Business is good, Steffani said, because of all the new construction in the county.
For the evening’s entertainment on the newly installed video system, there are stores that will deliver the cassette you’ve been meaning to see. There’s a hitch with orders from the Video Station, though: The customer has to order a pizza from the restaurant next door, as well. The pizza person delivers the pie and the movie.
Mike Cresci, owner of the Mission Viejo video store, said the system started out of necessity: There were too few parking spaces at the shopping center where his shop is located. The movie charge is $2.50 a day, same as pick-ups at the shop.
The pizza-and-movies combo “is just another thing that we do to be different, to be competitive,” he said.
For those seeking finer fare than pizza, Restaurant Express will pick up a meal at a nice restaurant and deliver it to the home. The price is just $4 more than what the restaurant charges for on-scene diners, and instead of tipping the waiter one greases the palm of the delivery person.
The bare-cupboard crew, meanwhile, can find help from Grocery Line.
The Newport Beach firm began operations in September and provides customers with a catalogue of 3,000 items available from the Pacific Ranch Market. A partner in the company, Frank Greenberg, said orders placed from 8 a.m. to noon are delivered by 5 p.m. to “an affluent client base” from Irvine south to San Juan Capistrano.
Greenberg said 98% of the company’s customers are women and estimated the household income at $60,000 to $80,000 a year. His customers are “more concerned with quality and service than they are with price,” Greenberg said.
By storing orders in a computer, the company can file the customer’s preferences in such matters as cuts of meat, ripeness of vegetables and color of toilet paper.
If no one’s home, refrigerated items are placed in an ice chest; the delivery person sometimes picks up a check for the groceries left in the same place, Greenberg said.
How about thefts from an unguarded ice chest? Greenberg said his company delivers to “upscale neighborhoods . . . not an area where there’s a lot of pilferage. . . . Most of their neighbors wouldn’t be caught dead stealing a carton of milk.”
Jeff Bathiany sees people who want to work off their calories away from health clubs.
Bathiany has a small van with a stationary bicycle and two exercise machines that he brings to clients’ homes three times a week, serving people who believe that gyms are too crowded and “you’re always waiting for your machine.”
In addition, “people find any excuse not to go” to a gym. They say, “I need gas in the car, I’ve got dinner cooking,” Bathiany said. When the van shows up at the house and Bathiany rings the doorbell, it reminds his body builders they’ve already paid nearly $500 a month in advance, so they’d better start pumping iron.
Although Bathiany’s fee is about 20 times what some gyms charge, he said his clients look at it as “just part of their monthly bill” for various services. He consults on nutrition as well and tries to get people used to a routine of working out that will eventually spur them to join a gym. But he has had customers for 2 years, he said, because “they go to a gym, quit, go to a gym, quit,” and then go back to him.
Dan Fischer, president of an ad agency, said that although Bathiany isn’t actually a company employee, “I just look at it as someone (else) on my payroll” when it comes time to write the monthly check.
“I just wanted to develop some healthy habits that would turn into a natural regimen for me, which it has,” Fischer said, adding that he has “lost 25 pounds of fat and gained maybe 8 pounds of muscle” since starting to work out with Bathiany nearly 2 years ago.
Fischer, who is 6 feet tall and weighs 175 pounds, said his neighbors started complaining about the van, so he now meets Bathiany and the mobile gym at a supermarket parking lot in Newport Beach 3 nights a week for his workouts.
For those with shining cars, well-fed and well-exercised bodies, a good haircut is always important. Again, they don’t have to drive to the beauty parlor, though they do have to walk out the front door.
Max Derseweh and his wife, Maureen, have a rolling beauty salon that makes house calls for a minimum of four people. Haircuts run $23 for men and $30 for women, done at one of two “stations” in a customized 30-foot-long van, which also has an upstairs waiting room. Derseweh said many of his customers are working women or women at home with children who don’t want to battle traffic to get their hair done.
He said a survey last year on women’s issues in Southern California “showed that the average woman spends 40 minutes driving to and from the hair salon. If you can eliminate that time . . . we like to believe we can give this type of service and more quality time with the family.”
Derseweh figures his typical customer gets her hair done every 4 to 6 weeks, and a fingernail treatment every 2 to 3 weeks. He’s hoping to get a van just for nails one of these days.
When a van or RV--or even a car--needs routine maintenance, Pam Baksa, owner of California Auto Clinic in Santa Ana, is willing to send someone to the house. The minimum charge is $65, and Baksa said that covers most bills.
Most of the firm’s mobile business is towing motorists whose cars break down, she said, but there are people who prefer to get preventive work done on their chariots at work or at home.
“People are extremely busy today, especially in the Orange County area,” Baksa said. “Time is of the essence. It’s sad but true, we don’t have a lot of time to waste. We’re always in a hurry.”
Few things can slow down a person in a hurry more than chasing a recalcitrant pet that has just seen a cat or dog carrier appear, conjuring up visions of a trip to the vet. Even if the animal is tracked down and captured, there’s the barking, meowing, whining and wailing en route to the doctor.
Sam Mooradian has a shortcut for all that. Mooradian runs a van service through the Newport Harbor Animal Hospital and Newport Hills Animal Hospital, coming to the house to pick up the pet and take it in for its shots, grooming or medical treatment. “I pick (the animals) up in the morning before people go to work and bring them back at night,” said Mooradian, who has customized his van with kennels to accommodate dogs of all sizes, from Chihuahuas to German shepherds.
If the hospital does not offer the service free to a customer, Mooradian charges from $8 to $24 for a round trip, depending on the distance, and donates $1 of that to the organization Guide Dog Boosters of America, which supports the use of guide dogs by blind people. Although he can bring a veterinarian out with him in an emergency, he said most of the three to seven animals he moves a day are simply being ferried from their homes to the animal hospital and back in his van.
Other at-home services include swimming lessons, from, yes, YMCA. The West County Family YMCA offers swimming classes for people using their back-yard pool. The Y, which asks for pool donations because it does not have a pool of its own, pays for the insurance and organizes the classes of about five children each. Last year, 20 to 30 families donated their pools, according to Janice Patrick, executive director of the West County Family YMCA.
Those who know how to swim but don’t know how to use a computer can get help too, from college student Martin Anderson, among others.
Anderson charges $50 an hour, with a 1-hour minimum, to come to a customer’s house and explain how to use that spiffy-looking computer that did everything except slice bread in the store but just sits there like a dumb piece of furniture now that it’s home. Anderson said he has occasionally repaired computers but prefers to show someone how to use the machine or to change the programming so it can do what the buyer thought it would do.
And, miracle of miracles, there’s actually a doctor in the county who makes house calls.
Dr. Dean S. Wood, a 51-year-old specialist in internal medicine, moved from the San Fernando Valley in 1982 and found Orange County “overloaded with doctors” practicing in his specialty. He joined with other doctors who made house calls so he could “become employable right away.”
Wood said he limits his practice to about 200 patients, nearly all of whom are “elderly with a lot of medical problems” and find it difficult to travel to a doctor’s office.
Although he doesn’t charge extra for house calls and figures he could make twice as much money by maintaining an office practice and catering to wealthier patients, “I certainly know that I’m needed,” Wood said.