Word: ende
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Lenk discovered the hard way that e-businesses couldn't simply duplicate existing retail operations, such as catalog companies, online. "You can't take the mail-order model and plug and play here. For example, we need real-time inventory control. We need the website integrated with the back end, so a customer knows if we have an item...
...course, is at the heart of the matter. Surely the Internet could be put to darker purposes. We may not live at the end of history, but we live in a country, and increasingly a world, where the large preoccupations of earlier generations have been resolved. We need no longer worry about subsistence, about food and shelter. For centuries philosophers have contemplated just this moment and wondered what would come next. For a very large number of people, it appears the answer is, eBay comes next...
...every week. The nation's top retailer sells everything from sweatpants to string beans, rakes to Ritalin. It keeps its prices low, its shelves stocked and its big, wide aisles peppered with blue-smocked clerks. The company will ring up about $160 billion in domestic sales by year's end, with profits on track to top $5 billion. With that kind of scratch--and a proven knack for giving people what they want--the House That Sam Built seems a shoo-in for success in cyberspace...
Picking a winner in this market is a tough call, in part because each pioneering e-grocer has a different idea about what kind of goods you want and when you want them. At the basic end of the scale, Netgrocer.com wants to send you nonperishables like cereal or juice in a FedEx box sometime in the next four days. At the other, San Francisco-based Webvan will bring you hideously perishable stuff like ice cream and iceberg lettuce within a 30-min. window...
...trouble didn't necessarily end with delivery. When I sampled the beef Wellington, although remarkably juicy and delicious, I realized it wasn't going to slice cleanly into pieces suitable for lap dining (fearful everyone would be busy during Washington's party-gridlock season, I had let the guest list swell to an sro crowd of 30). I was worried enough to e-mail my editors in New York City: How about a back-up ham, that mainstay of Irish funerals? "Boring," they replied...