Word: maile
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Applied to the world of calculators, that's something of a curiosity. But applied to everyday retail, it's a revolution. The idea of fixed prices is only about 100 years old. Before then nearly everything was negotiable. The last great retail revolution was mail order, led by Sears, Roebuck in the 1890s, and it solidified the idea of fixed prices, since buyer and seller were often separated by hundreds of miles of rail track. In the Internet age even buyers and sellers separated by 10,000 miles of fiber-optic cable are closer than those prairie purchasers were...
...inhabited the rest of the year. On the ranch he'd ride horses, brand cattle with a LAZY G, fix windmills and tool around in a 1962 International Harvester Scout. He helped his grandpa fix a D6 Caterpillar tractor using nothing but a 3-ft.-high stack of mail-order manuals. "You have to have a lot of patience on a ranch in the middle of nowhere," he says...
...government decided to get out of the Internet business and allow private companies to step in and develop it. Bezos recalls, "I'm sitting there thinking we can be a complete first mover in e-commerce." He researched mail-order companies, figuring that things that sold well by mail would do well online. He made a list of the Top 20 mail-order products and looked for where he could create "the most value for customers." Value, in his equation, would be something customers craved: selection, say, or convenience or low prices. "Unless you could create something with a huge...
...that's what ultimately led to books. There weren't any huge mail-order book catalogs simply because a good catalog would contain thousands, if not millions of listings. The catalog would need to be as big as a phone book--too expensive to mail. That, of course, made it perfect for the Internet, which is the ideal container for limitless information...
...Washington's eye, terrorism has supplanted computer failure as the primary Y2K bug. President Clinton urged Americans to be vigilant against possible terrorist attacks. The FBI on Thursday also issued a mail-bomb alert against any unsolicited mail bearing a postmark from Frankfurt, Germany, while a man was arrested in the Bahamas after he tried to flee when questioned about suspicious equipment he was trying to carry aboard a plane. And the specter of a bomb plot by Canada-based Algerian exiles grew Thursday as a Vermont prosecutor presented evidence linking Lucia Garofalo, arrested Sunday trying to cross into...