1. A14 EZ M2 KLMNO MONDAY, AUGUST 24, 2015
Bottom line: It appears that
Amazon remains the one to beat
when it comes to speed.
(Amazon’s chief executive,
Jeffrey P. Bezos, owns The
Washington Post.) While Wal-
Mart was a bit slower, it was at
least reliable, with the items
showing up in the promised time
frame. And both Amazon and
Wal-Mart have easy-to-use Web
sites and vast enough
merchandise that you can
usually easily find what you’re
looking for.
Jet still seems to be
experiencing growing pains, but
its victory on price means
it should not be counted out.
Even if shoppers aren’t pinching
their pennies like they were
during the recession, they
remain deeply conscious of
whether they’re getting a good
deal. If Jet can regularly make
people feel like they’re getting
the best price, that may yet earn
Jet a deeply loyal following and
buy the upstart time to work out
its kinks.
sarah.halzack@washpost.com
 Excerpted from
washingtonpost.com/news/
business
Customer service: There
weren’t any hitches in my
Amazon and Wal-Mart orders, so
I didn’t need to utilize their
customer service programs. But
it’s worth noting that Jet tried to
make nice with me when it
realized those batteries would be
showing up really, really late. Jet
sent me an e-mail saying, among
other things, “We’re so sorry that
we’re experiencing a little Jet
lag.” While the delay on the order
was frustrating, it was at least
somewhat reassuring that they
were working to correct it.
Packaging and presentation:
The biggest difference here was
the appearance of the basketball
upon its arrival. The basketball
from Jet arrived encased in
bright-blue, branded Spalding
cardboard packaging. The Wal-
Mart basketball arrived in that
same packaging, but it was
partially deflated. The Amazon
basketball was fully inflated but
wasn’t wrapped in anything and
appeared to have some smudges
on its surface. That would be fine
if I were planning to take it to the
park and scuff it up more myself,
but it would have been
frustrating if, say, I planned to
give it to someone as a gift.
achieved that: My basketball
arrived Aug. 12, and a second
package containing the rest of
the order arrived on Aug. 18 after
a failed delivery attempt the
previous day by the package
carrier. Still, Amazon got the
entire order to me faster than
Wal-Mart did.
Wal-Mart may soon get more
competitive in this area. It is
testing its Shipping Pass
program, which would be similar
to Prime. For an annual fee of
$50, shoppers receive free,
unlimited three-day shipping on
their orders.
Selection: Jet seemed to
struggle on this measure, too. Jet
has practically no apparel on its
site right now: A search for
“jeans” turns up books that have
the word “jeans” in the title. Also,
searches such as “dishwashing
detergent” and “Monster High,” a
popular toy line among young
girls, had significantly fewer
results on Jet than on Amazon or
Wal-Mart. It may be that Jet just
has a smaller selection than its
rivals, or that its search function
may need some fine-
tuning. Either way, it’s harder to
find what you’re looking for on
Jet — at least for now.
is the area where Jet’s rookie
status really showed.
The ibuprofen from the
newcomer arrived lightning-fast,
showing up on my doorstep a
little more than 24 hours after I
placed my order. But I was still
waiting for the batteries,
nine business days later. In an
era when Amazon has trained us
to expect things to arrive in two
days, this seemed like a painfully
long time to wait for such a basic
item.
Amazon got the Advil and the
basketball to me within two
business days, fulfilling its Prime
shipping promise. The batteries
didn’t arrive until Aug. 14, two
business days later, but those
were not eligible for Prime and
Amazon still met its shipping
promise on that purchase. But it
should serve as a reminder that
while 20 million items are
Prime-eligible, there are still
many purchases on Amazon for
which you can’t buy speed.
Wal-Mart met its promised
deadlines. When I selected its
free shipping option, it told me I
should expect to receive my
order by Aug. 18 — six business
days after I ordered them.
And, indeed, Wal-Mart
basketball in each order.
Of course, this is just one
order, and thus a limited
snapshot. But it nevertheless
provides some insight into these
online retailers’ strengths and
weaknesses. Below is a
breakdown of how they fared.
Price: Jet easily won on price.
My order at Jet rang up at $31.01.
The same order cost $39.82 at
Amazon and $41.01 at Wal-Mart.
But keep in mind that while I
have a free trial membership at
Jet, there is typically a $49
annual fee to get access to those
prices. At Amazon, I paid $99 to
join its Prime program, which
gets me free two-day shipping on
some items. My shipping costs
would have been free on this
order anyway because Amazon
offers free shipping on many
purchases over $35 to non-Prime
shoppers.
At Wal-Mart, I paid no such
fee. So, while Jet may have
bested Amazon and Wal-Mart on
price on this specific order, it’s
worth thinking about how often
you’ll shop on any of these sites
as you try to determine their
overall value to you.
Speed and meeting the
promised deliver-by date: This
The battle for
your e-commerce
dollars heated up
significantly this
summer. When
Amazon, the
Goliath of the category, held a
massive Prime Day sale, Wal-
Mart hit back with a rival event.
Meanwhile, the well-funded
start-up Jet launched in July,
attracting big buzz with its
promise to offer the lowest
prices.
The flurry of activity may have
you wondering: Is it time to
shake up my online shopping
routine?
To help you decide, I
conducted a simple experiment:
On Aug. 10, I ordered the same
three items online from Amazon,
Jet and Wal-Mart. I placed all the
orders within less than
30 minutes of one another and
purchased the same brand and
package size of each item.
The order included two
household staples: A bottle of
ibuprofen and a package of AAA
batteries. But I also wanted to
see how the retailers would do
with something that wasn’t
exactly an everyday item, so I
included a Spalding Tip-In
theyspreadworduptheirchainof
command that they had found a
guy who knew the streets and had
intelligence they needed: where
to get boats and gas. Where to find
elderly people who needed help.
Which streets were haunted by
armed junkies.
“I said, ‘This is the person we
need to know,’ ” Kelly recalled.
Within 48 hours, they had a
platoon. Until the water receded,
Bellau helped direct search-and-
rescue missions. The guardsmen
were struck by his determination.
But they also feared he was run-
ning too hard.
During downtime, when Bellau
opened up, they learned he was
driven by fear: He worried that his
childhoodhomeonthecity’sflood-
edeasternflankwasdestroyedand
that his mother, whom he had
been unable to reach, was dead.
“I think he felt if he stopped he
was vulnerable. Physically and
mentally. He kept going and kept
going,” said Miranda, the Guard
corporal.
Eventually, the water receded,
and Bellau finally had a chance to
find his mother’s house. His fears
were confirmed: The place had
taken five feet of water. It was
uninhabitable.
But his mother was safe in
Mississippi.
A
s New Orleans inched, and
later sprinted, toward re-
covery, so did Bellau. He
took a job as head coach of Tulane
University’s cycling team and re-
started his own career by joining
Palmer Cycling, another profes-
sional team. But his Katrina ex-
perience haunted him.
In October 2005, after Johnson
urged him to leave New Orleans
and join her in New York, he
stopped taking her calls and broke
off the relationship. He started
seeing himself as a survivalist,
suspicious of authority, someone
who saw vulnerabilities every-
where he looked. He stocked his
car with emergency food. He was,
he says, “just armed to the teeth.”
Five years passed, and Bellau’s
story spread. When the state mu-
seum opened an exhibit called
“Living with Hurricanes: Katrina
and Beyond,” Bellau’s 24-foot boat
joined other artifacts from the
storm, including a wrecked piano
owned by music legend Fats Dom-
ino and seats from the heavily
damaged Superdome.
The exhibit, he says, helped
bringhimback.Hestartedcycling
past the museum on daily train-
ing rides, the boat a familiar blur
in the corner of his eye. Eventual-
ly, he began to view his experience
as a story he knew, but that some-
one else lived.
Last November, Bellau and
Johnson, both 47, got married in
Jackson Square, in front of the
boat and nearly 200 people.
Among the guests was Donna
Niemoller of Sacramento. After
the storm, Bellau had located her
daughter’s home and rescued her
cat. Now, Neimoller takes Bellau
out to dinner once a year.
“So many people needed him,”
she says of Bellau. “But he needed
a little bit of people, too.”
national@washpost.com
Guarino is a freelance writer.
By the seventh day, Bellau, de-
pressed and hungry himself, was
plotting an exit strategy. He fer-
ried a family of 10 to a man with a
truck, who was taking the people
he rescued to safety. He told the
man that this was his last trip.
An elderly woman gripped his
arm.
“You can’t leave,” she said.
“These are your people, and
there’s more of them out there.”
“That kind of grabbed me and
turned me around,” he says.
He returned to his list and
motored on.
B
ellau was staring at the wa-
ter at the end of a street,
dressed in out-of-date fa-
tigues and white tennis shoes
caked in gunk, when the National
Guard finally arrived.
Bellau “looked like a looter,”
said Mike Kelly, a guardsman
from California.
The guardsmen gave him fresh
clothes and military boots, and
Johnson says. “He was so low . . . I
was talking him off the ledge
every single day.”
Theaddresslistswereprecious.
Sometimes before he even
reached a house, he would hear
the screaming of people who had
been trapped for days without
food or water. While nearly all
were thankful for his arrival,
many refused to leave. One man, a
former Marine, addressed him
from the roof of his house wearing
nothing but boxer shorts and
pointing a handgun.
Bellau would talk with them
and return with food, or at least to
check on their condition. One
elderly woman who insisted on
staying in her home despite the
intense heat was dead the next
time he circled back. That hard-
ened his resolve.
“I wasn’t being diplomatic and
certainly not sympathetic,” he
says. “I told people, ‘If you don’t
comewithmenow,you’regoingto
die.’ ”
tant. She scoured the Internet
message boards, particularly on
the news Web site Nola.com, for
pleas from displaced New Orlea-
niansaskingforsomeonetocheck
on their loved ones, pets and
houses.
Her home office became a war
room. She marked addresses on a
blown-up map of New Orleans
and prioritized them. Every night,
she e-mailed Bellau a new list of
addresses located in an area that
would be navigable by water in a
single day.
All day and often at night,
Bellau paddled through the
wreckage of the city. The place
smelled like death. Even the birds
disappeared. At night, he would
stash the boat he had hot-wired
with a screwdriver, bring home
the battery so it wouldn’t get
stolen, and use a cordless drill to
siphon more gas from abandoned
cars.
“He started getting Rambo on
me; he wanted to fix everything,”
porch. They immediately tried to
jump into Bellau’s pirogue, which
already held a Saint Bernard dog
and two cats in a laundry basket.
A helicopter appeared and, aim-
ing to put out the fire, dumped
thousands of gallons of water on
everything.
Everyone went overboard —
the cats to the bottom. But Bellau
managedtopullallthepeopleand
animals back up and paddle
toward higher ground.
He went days like that, negoti-
ating with people throughout Up-
town to come out of their homes
into his boat, even though he was
a stranger and didn’t have a good
answer to the question: “Where
are you bringing me?”
“I’d say, ‘a better place,’ ” Bellau
recalled. “I had one guy ask, ‘Well
what’s a better place than New
Orleans?’ ”
Soon, Bellau enlisted the help
of Candy Johnson, his girlfriend
on Long Island, who temporarily
took leave of her job as an accoun-
sacrificing his life,” says Alan
Miranda, a California National
Guard corporal and Iraq war vet-
eran who met Bellau days after
the levee breaches. “The guy
should have gotten a Congres-
sional Medal of Honor, in my
opinion. . . . God knows how
many people would have died
without him.”
In some ways, Bellau had been
preparing for Katrina his entire
life. More than 20 years ago, while
strandedonthecampusofLouisi-
ana State University in Baton
Rouge without a car, he bought a
bicycle. Then he joined the cy-
cling club and made a discovery
about endurance: “I was pretty
good at it.”
He started competing globally
and wound up at the Olympic
trials in 1996. By the time Katrina
struck, he was finishing the Tour
of French Guyana, a race in South
America, as a member of the
Louisiana-based team Herring
Gas. He learned of the pending
storm on an airport television.
Luckily, a friend had snatched
Bellau’s Ford Contour and moved
it to Mississippi for safekeeping.
Back in the United States, Bellau
got his car, stocked it with sup-
plies, threw his bike on a rack and
sneaked back into town two days
after the levees broke. He wore
military fatigues and carried a
.40-caliber handgun in a side
holster, which helped get him
waved through military check-
points.
Back in town, he visited his
house in the Irish Channel, about
two miles upriver from the
French Quarter. It was dry, and so
was his cat. So he drove around
the neighborhood.
Everywhere, he saw old people,
the infirm, stray pets, all of them
walking the streets dazed, with
no way to get to safety.
So he started giving rides.
His first passengers he’ll never
forget: a couple suffering from
diabetes stuck with dangerously
warm insulin because of the city-
wide power failure. He drove
them to the downtown conven-
tion center, which was swarming
with hundreds of people suffer-
ing similar hardships.
Before he let the couple out at a
military medical tent, Bellau’s car
was swallowed by the crowd.
Some people jumped on his hood.
“They wanted a ride out,” he says.
“I was surrounded within 90 sec-
onds.”
He hit the gas and escaped in
reverse. From then on, he vowed
to save whomever he could find,
but he would do it alone, away
from authorities, and often in the
dark of night.
“I knew it was going to be
dangerous, but had no idea I was
going to be so alone,” he says. “I
thought I would be coming in to
back up the police or back up
groups of normal guys coming in
to help. But there was nobody.”
T
he next day “was hell,” Bel-
lau says. He procured a
pirogue, a small flat-
bottomed boat similar to a kayak
but meant for navigating swamps,
and set out into the water. He saw
a fire in the distance and, using a
broomstick, paddled closer and
heard shouting.
A house was on fire, and a
couple were trapped on their
KATRINA FROM A1
A man with a boat did all he could to save lives
10 YEARS AFTER KATRINA | A HERO
PHOTOS BY JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST
TOP: Ken Bellau roamed a flooded New Orleans in 2005, seeking people and pets to bring to safety. ABOVE LEFT: The boat that Bellau used
sits in front of a Jackson Square museum. ABOVE RIGHT: Candy Bellau, who scoured the Internet from Long Island to get leads for Bellau.
Looking for the slam-dunk option during an online matchup of top retailers
Business
SARAH
HALZACK
“I told people, ‘If you don’t come with me now, you’re going to die.’ ”
Ken Bellau, a cyclist who sought to persuade trapped residents to get into his boat to evacuate the city
Ken Bellau in his own words
 Watch a video with footage from
the boat at wapo.st/katrinahero.