Word: internet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...long as there has been an Internet, of course, there have been anti-Internet fuddy-duddies, pessimists who lament the end of face-to-face sociability as people retreat from the bustling public square to their computers for the anonymous encounters of cyberspace. With some justification, the pessimists can trace the decline of shopping, that most social of activities, from the mom-and-pop corner shop, where everyone knows everyone else, to the department store, where we might recognize one of the cashiers, and from there to the vast warehouse of the superstore, where no one knows anyone--and finally...
...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...
Attacking from the Internet is Amazon.com the Web superstore that began selling toys this summer and plans to do to eToys what it did to CDnow in the online music business--knock it out of the top spot. Attacking from the street as well as from cyberspace are the classic "bricks-and-mortar" retailers Toys "R" Us and KB Toys, which were written off as Net players after the last holiday season but this year have developed online offshoots...
Instead, there is a cyberstore that never closes and is more likely to have what you desire in stock because of that infinite shelf space and the millions of square feet of cheap warehouse real estate in Utah or Nevada. "The pure Internet plays don't have nearly the infrastructure cost that off-line plays do," says Mike May, an analyst at Jupiter Communications, an e-commerce research firm in New York City. "A single point of sale can be used to reach an entire country or the entire world." As Jay Herratti, president of Boo.com North America, a sportswear...
...about this. It is all so scalable. Add a few servers, a dozen more Web pages, a couple more customer-service reps, run your traffic up another digit, expand into new product lines and sell a hundred thousand more books or CDs or power tools. This kind of growth--Internet gurus like David Wetherell, enthralled by the mathematics of community, call it viral growth--defies conventional valuation and makes the usual measure of retailing--same-store sales, sales per square foot--seem like roman numerals or the abacus, relics of another...