Word: ebay
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...quit her job as an engineering clerk at Canadian National Railways because she was struggling with systemic lupus and diabetes. For several years, she fought for her life. In time she partially recovered. "I became well enough to be bored," she says. Then, 18 months ago, she discovered eBay...
...their travels over the years, she and her husband had acquired acres of stuff. She started posting lots of it for auction. When she was well enough, she began attending public auctions and buying up lots. Today she tests her strength, challenging herself with eBay, working as much as her illness allows. "For me," she says, "it wasn't the sale. It was being part of something again. It was the contact with people. I guess I used it to make me feel better...
Many antiques dealers, who would seem most threatened by eBay, have seen their livelihoods transformed. David James, for example, opened his shop in Alexandria, Va., eight years ago. He deals mostly in what the trade calls smalls: candlesticks, glassware and other such collectibles. He's still got the store, but today his business--and his life--revolve around a warehouse a few miles away, where he stores the treasures he has gleaned from scouting estate sales and flea markets. From a cramped, windowless cubicle, he monitors the hundreds of auctions he has posted--moving anywhere from...
...evidence suggests that eBay represents a return to that earlier one-on-one sociability--and maybe even improves on it, since the Net collapses the traditional divisions of geography and class. Wherever you plant your modem, the fabled new economy arrives--even in the boonies, as Patricia Hoyt calls her hometown of Baker, Mont., roughly 225 miles from the nearest big city, Billings. The old economy of oil and cattle has not been kind to Baker, and when oil prices dropped, business dried up at the motel Hoyt and her husband...
...Hoyt had a hobby: making decorative glass beads. Thanks to eBay, her hobby is now her livelihood. She sells as many as 3,000 beads a month, for as much as $50 each. eBay has given her more than a new career. She refers without irony to the bead community she has discovered online. Glass beads have spawned an entire network of chat groups and e-mail lists. Many of her customers buy weekly. "If I don't put up any auctions for a week," she says, "they'll write...