Word: lasting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When Sharon Balkowitsch sold antiques from a stall in Bismarck, N.D., she was a victim of geography. There were few buyers in her hometown of 54,000, and prices were low. She started putting her wares up for auction on eBay last year and suddenly found herself part of the global marketplace. An Art Deco ashtray she bought for $20 was bid up quickly--and sold for $290. A vase she got for $5 went to a California buyer--for $585. She even sold an old tractor online--for $2,300, to a priest from New York. Checks have been...
...estimated $15.5 billion by 2001. eBay is the dominant player in the online-auction world, with 7.7 million registered users bidding on some 3 million items. But other Internet heavyweights are hard at work trying to break off some of the market for themselves. Amazon.com added an auction site last spring. (It appears to be starting slowly; as of October, eBay had more than five times as many visitors as Amazon.com's auction site). Yahoo, the most visited site on the Web, introduced its own auctions last year. (Yahoo's big selling point: listing items is free.) And in September...
...kitsch (Elvis snow globes, anyone?), and a scary number of Beanie Babies. But there's also luxe (usually a few Rolls-Royces are going at any given moment). Poke around and you'll come across the impressively old (dinosaur teeth!), the bizarrely new (who really needs to bid on last month's TV Guide?) and the just plain weird (anyone for a metal BEWARE OF ATTACK RATS sign?). And you will find thriving subcultures that collect things you didn't know anyone bothered to collect. Really, people: antique waffle irons...
Melissa Wicker likes to shop for her friends. And she has a lot of friends--nearly 8 million, at last count. Of course, the word friend is used loosely these days, in an era when e-mail establishes instant intimacy between total strangers separated by thousands of miles. So it's no surprise that Wicker, 46, an assistant district attorney in Isle of Palms, S.C., hasn't met many of her new friends in the flesh. But they're on her mind when she cruises clothing stores and comes upon a tantalizing markdown in designer duds. She buys...
...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...