In a city of deliveries, the Starbucks stops here

EVEN in a city where you can get everything and anything at any time, we recently came within inches of the holy grail. Hand printed on pale blue paper, a sign near the cash register at the Starbucks at 85th Street and 1st Avenue announced that it would “deliver” within a three-block radius. Although I live on the other side of Manhattan -- literally dozens of nondelivering Starbucks away -- I had to check it out.

Imagine having a decaf skim latte, extra hot with extra foam for your tired self, and a mocha Frappuccino for your inert husband brought right to the door -- to within a few feet of your very own couch next to your coffee table covered with your bills and Sunday papers.

Imagine that.

It’s hard to be impressed in a city that long ago reached the apotheosis in what can be delivered. There’s nothing we can’t get sent to the door, or at least the doorman. Antibiotics are delivered shortly after the pediatrician diagnoses strep. Heart-shaped socks, gift wrapped for a birthday, arrive courtesy of the local lingerie shop.

The husband’s new tux is tailored and the owner of the men’s shop has it messengered (a verb Manhattan bestowed upon the world) right over, no extra charge. New York pets get “delivered” by a pet chauffeur to the vet; others “deliver” their children by car service each morning to schools in far corners of town. The butcher, the baker, the shoemaker, yes, even the candlestick maker all deliver.

Whole legions of, frankly, faceless people traverse this city providing “same-day” delivery. Sure, the Internet has given everyone access to adult movies (straight or gay), firewood or wine the next day. But in New York, you get it all within hours.

Delivery has been so long a part of New York culture that it seems to exist outside time -- here when you arrive, omnipresent like Central Park and fashion and anxiety. It’s not even worth mentioning that food traveling into the Manhattan night is ubiquitous. Suffice it to say that there aren’t many places where a kid can look at his tired, working mother at dinnertime and say, “Mom, I want Ethiopian; let’s order in,” and dinner is on the table in 20 minutes.

The daily delivery

WHEN she is writing a book, Jennet Conant rarely leaves her apartment. She also rarely enters her kitchen. Thus, her life revolves around having coffee, in the classic blue and white Greek-themed “Anthora” paper cup that says, “We are happy to serve you,” delivered from her corner deli. In two-hour intervals. A $10 minimum, however, means she has had to acquaint herself with the obscure canned goods sold there. So after a day of having $1.50 cups of coffee, she finds herself staring at a counter covered with canned artichokes, Triscuits and bags of Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies.

But she is unabashed -- in fact, brazen -- about her delivery habit.

Almost every Friday, a guy from McDonald’s, a national chain that has adapted to local customs, bikes four blocks to her apartment with a bag of burgers for her and her 10-year-old son. “Try reaching the $20 minimum at that place,” she quips. That’s not a problem at Barneys. When Conant can’t write another sentence, she retreats to her bed with a magazine, and if she “must” have that Hermes bag on Page 36, she calls the store with her charge card number.

When the clerk says, “Shall we have it messengered over to you this afternoon?” she says, “But of course!” She developed this addiction after overhearing a similar exchange in the store between a clerk on the phone with Mr. Diller. “If Barry can do it, surely I can.”

She is integral to a very Manhattan equation, which goes something like this: Population density times per-capita income equals a high rate of delivery. Of course, whole neighborhoods in the Bronx and Brooklyn are redlined from even a pizza drop-off. But with FreshDirect, the hot online grocery, now there are people in all five boroughs who never set foot in a grocery store. Deliverymen show up within the two hours the shopper has requested. Fees are reasonable; tipping is not permitted. And apparently the melons and tomatoes are as good as those sold at that famous West Side market, Fairway.

But melons and tomatoes are nothing without delivery people, who struggle to live off of minimum wage and tips even while meeting new challenges like carrying two palm trees, one in each arm, up Park Avenue for a toga party in the dead of winter.

While New Yorkers love to go out on their town, they want to do it on their own terms. They’ll venture out for that toga party but not for a cup of coffee in the middle of spring. That, they get delivered. Probably this trend began around the invention of the station wagon. Most urbanites don’t have station wagons; they don’t have cars. They hire people to schlep their heavy stuff. New Yorkers don’t lug, not even for a few blocks and certainly not on the subway.

A fleet of messengers

SINCE Mobil Messenger Service opened in 1971, Paul Harris has answered every imaginable request. Based in Midtown, Harris has a 200-person army using feet, bikes, roller skates, cars, vans and public transportation to get around town. “It used to be mostly paperwork going around, and then the fax came along,” he says, describing how his business has changed. “The computer revolution eliminated photographers and film editors and travel agents as clients. Now we move mostly packages.”

And an occasional pizza.

Harris has a client on the Upper East Side, a doctor, who likes a pizzeria on the Lower West Side. For a $16 delivery charge, he gets to eat his favorite pie a few times a week.

Overall, the rates aren’t too bad. A package sent from the East Side to the West Side goes for nine bucks. The palm trees cost $35. Harris transports almost an entire artificial forest to a client’s apartment about once a month. Another client who lives in New Paltz, N.Y., about 90 miles up the Hudson River, has almost every household item conveyed from Manhattan. She’s a kosher vegetarian

But to check out if something as simple as a soy cappuccino from Starbucks could be delivered in a boring part of the East Side of Manhattan, I walked breathlessly across town wondering if my New York was once again on the cutting edge of a cultural revolution.

Alas, it was not to be.

Apparently the corporate muck-a-mucks had gotten wind (probably the same way I did by reading about it in the newspaper) that this store, one of about 150 in Manhattan, had delivered a chai tea, a coffee and a cocoa, all piping hot, to a customer in a record nine minutes. Delivery is not in the corporate playbook. And when globalization, which demands that Starbucks offer sameness in every corner of the Earth, collides with New Yorkization, which wants what it wants when it wants it, well, it’s obvious what wins out.

When I arrived at the store, the little blue sign was gone and a young woman steaming milk said dully, “Nope, we don’t deliver anymore.”

But it’s just as well. I just got a new chrome, Briel semi-commercial combination 10-cup drip coffee maker and pod-adaptable pump espresso machine.

It was delivered from Zabar’s.