Word: coulds
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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 manager...
Toys "R" Us was at first regarded as an industry joke, its website plagued by overcrowding and inadequate order fulfillment. KBkids.com didn't even exist last year. The space belonged to eToys, the first online retailer to design a truly kid-friendly toy site. Kids could create electronic wish lists, gifts came wrapped, batteries came included. "I saw immediately that here was a channel that could revolutionize how you serve the toy market," says eToys CEO Toby Lenk...
...last Christmas, eToys proved you could sell Barbies and Brio trains on the Web, doing $20 million in sales and capturing more than 50% of the online toy biz. So this year off-line players had no choice but to go cyber and--surprise, surprise--they've been up to the task. Toys "R" Us, the bumbling, old-economy slow mover, has in the past two quarters come on like light sabers in the toy space, setting up a subsidiary, Toysrus.com and prepping that company to go public sometime next year...
Currently, though, Beantown is the exception. Even Peapod, the oldest and most widespread Web grocer, is available to only 8% of the U.S. population. "It's taken quite a while," admits Peapod CEO and president Bill Molloy. "Early on, people felt they didn't deserve this service yet. How could they tell their parents they didn't want to go to the store...
What a delicious assignment: invite 12 people to dinner at my Washington house, come up with any menu I want, hire someone to serve and clean up, and charge the whole feast to the company. I could hear the Champagne corks popping...