AILSA CHANG, HOST:
At 6 o'clock most mornings, Peter Stein is already out the door. By 7:45, he's pulling into Manhattan, ready to make his first delivery in a truck packed to the gills with oysters.
PETER STEIN: So I have three dozen for you - unless you only wanted two.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Three (laughter).
STEIN: Three, OK.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Stein is the owner of Peeko Oysters in Long Island. When the restaurants he normally sells to closed up, he started delivering oysters door-to-door to New Yorkers - 15 bucks a dozen. The best part - no New York traffic.
STEIN: I can get anywhere I want to go in a matter of a couple of minutes. After 500 feet, turn right onto Ninth Avenue.
KELLY: Stein recorded the sounds of his delivery service for us. And when we reached him by phone, he said news of his service had traveled fast through Facebook, neighborhood message boards and the old-fashioned way.
STEIN: I drive up to this guy's stoop, where he's waiting for me. And he lets out, like, a hooting and hollering kind of noise as I pull up. And his neighbors hear that. And they're like, what's going on out there? And we shout back up that, you know, I have oysters being delivered. And I had two or three people come up and say, can I buy some?
CHANG: One customer, Taylor Ray, thinks the appeal of the oysters isn't just their taste but the chance for people stuck at home to try something new.
TAYLOR RAY: It's experiential, right? Like, you need gloves, and you need a shucking knife. And it's a project.
KELLY: Still, driving door-to-door hundreds of miles a day, it's an expensive way to do business. And Stein used to sell five times as many oysters to restaurants. His goal now, he says, isn't profit. It's just keeping cash filtering through his business and the economy.
STEIN: I'm no economist. But like, the idea is that, like, we keep cash flowing, like it cycles around. Right? I mean, you pay your electric bill. That bill eventually comes back to me as a farmer because somebody at the electric company gets paid because you paid it and they bought oysters.
CHANG: And if Stein's new business model does outlive the coronavirus, his customer Taylor Ray is ready to shuck out for more.
RAY: Even if we weren't in this pandemic, had I known that an option existed to have a dude drive up in a pickup truck and hand me fresh oysters that he had harvested that morning, I would have done it in a heartbeat.
KELLY: Proof that even in this bad news economy, you can still find a few pearls. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.