Word: amazons
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Plenty of reasons suggest that e-tail will crush retail. Take selection. There are the infinite miles of infinite shelf space that Amazon's Jeff Bezos loves to cackle about. And there's no need to set up those costly stores, with rent and utility bills due every month and a sales force to handle those pesky customers...
...malls with the same stores for a generation now, sipping Orange Juliuses as we wade past the Limited on the way to the food court. If you were cool, if you "got it," you shopped online: it was convenient, it was competitively priced, it was fun. Web retailers like Amazon could even engage the intellect, making recommendations and offering a venue for shared literary criticism. When was the last time a salesclerk offered that kind of guidance? "People are more and more fed up with the kind of service they get in the big stores," says Connie Keithahn, an office...
Investors clearly think the game is over, rewarding pure-play e-tailers with market capitalizations that dwarf their off-line competitors--Amazon's $32 billion, vs. Sears' and K Mart's combined $17 billion; eToys' $4.5 billion, vs. Toys "R" Us' $3.6 billion; and, even more amazing, airline-ticket broker Priceline.com's $8.3 billion, vs. the combined $8.6 billion market cap of Continental Airlines, US Airways and United Airlines...
...along the way, more money in the pockets of Amazon employees. Michael Krantz, our San Francisco bureau chief, hung around their offices in Seattle for a few days and noticed how the subject of stock options never came up. "They're all imbued with this giddy faith that their best days lie ahead of them," says Krantz. "The subtext, of course, which they are well trained never to mention to reporters, is that if they're right, a lot of them are going to be extremely rich...
...about the cover image. Photographer Greg Heisler and art director Arthur Hochstein came up with the idea of shooting our Person of the Year inside an Amazon shipping box, complete with plastic-foam chips. Not only was Bezos game but his cheerfulness never flagged even after he'd spent nearly an hour in cardboard. Bezos' gleeful reaction when he saw a Polaroid shot of the image that day: "This is really weird...