WhyRunOut Buys Control of PDQuick

Web-based delivery service WhyRunOut.com has acquired a majority stake in Internet rival PDQuick.com and plans to change PDQuick’s name back to Pink Dot.

“Pink Dot has been around for 12 years, and I think it will be around for another 12 years,” said Dan Frahm, chief executive of WhyRunOut, headquartered in Aliso Viejo.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. WhyRunOut will keep its name, for the time being, in its San Diego County and Orange County delivery area.

Frahm said it is unclear how executives will reconcile the different formats of the two companies. Both offer same-day grocery delivery, but Pink Dot delivers from small warehouses while WhyRunOut delivers from local supermarkets, dry cleaners and other merchants.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do on this,” Frahm said. “We don’t have anything to announce on our plan at this point.”

PDQuick had been shuttering several of its unprofitable locations in recent months.

Earlier this spring, it tried to merge with rival Kozmo.com in a bid for survival, but that deal fell through when key funding for PDQuick failed to materialize. Kozmo.com shut down weeks later.

On Wednesday, after the deal was completed, PDQuick employees were locked out of their offices and told they could reapply with the new company. The new Pink Dot will hire about 350 PDQuick drivers and workers but probably won’t retain any more of the company’s staff, Frahm said.

WhyRunOut, like most Web-based delivery businesses, is unprofitable. Frahm said he expects it to be in the black within a couple of months.

Analysts were a little more skeptical. “The instant-gratification market is difficult” to cater to on a big scale, said Ken Cassar of Jupiter Communications. To earn a profit, these firms will have to raise delivery fees, he said. And when fees escalate, “there’s a certain threshold at which [even] the rich are willing to do their own shopping.”