Word: ideas
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...pioneered a tricky business. No one else was selling toys online at the volume Lenk envisioned. "There's nothing that's easy," Lenk says. "The details are really hard." Everything--the software, the shipping procedures, the wrapping system--had to be invented on the fly, including the ingenious idea of streamlining the warehouse process by having pickers, packers, loaders, replenishers and order processors all wear different-colored hats. 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...
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...
...slightly more active may prefer to use bar-code scanners, which a company called Symbol Technologies is embedding into Palm handheld computers. Here's the idea: simply scan the unique 12-digit bar code of each product in your kitchen as you use it, and a replacement is on its way. If you prefer to stay in the La-Z-Boy, munching on pizza, get your refrigerator to order the groceries. Electrolux and Frigidaire have already developed prototype smart fridges, which, we're promised, will automatically sense when your milk carton feels light or your cheese smells like unlaundered socks...
...boring as going hungry. Dinner by committee was my worst idea yet. Through Jeeves, I reached the Smithfield Collection smithfield-companies.com/collection) and despite the pretentious name for a company that slaughters pigs, I got delivery of a crusty, honey-soaked ham in an ice chest left under the porch, per my instructions, in one day's time...
...declared victory--and the refugees returned. At a time of disquiet about U.S. interventions in the world, Albright evoked an earlier moment in the American Century, when the U.S. did not shrink from sending its soldiers abroad to right wrongs and battle tyrants. "We're getting used to the idea," she told TIME, "that there are different ways of exerting American force...