Word: millions
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...buyers and sellers can get acquainted and swap tips, drop in at a cafe where they can catch up on the latest community news. Everywhere you turn--or click--you find the chipper, boosterish tone of a small-town newspaper--that is, a small-town paper with almost 8 million writers and readers...
...last Christmas, eToys proved you could sell Barbies and Brio trains on the Web, doing $20 million in sales and capturing more than 50% of the online toy biz. So this year off-line players had no choice but to go cyber and--surprise, surprise--they've been up to the task. Toys "R" Us, the bumbling, old-economy slow mover, has in the past two quarters come on like light sabers in the toy space, setting up a subsidiary, Toysrus.com and prepping that company to go public sometime next year...
...tough to see why 100 million customers shop at Wal-Mart 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...
...Mart does face some challenges. It's the leading logistics company in the world, but it is not set up for shipping directly to consumers, an essential link in the e-commerce chain. To fill the gap, Wal-Mart has contracted Books-A-Million and Fingerhut to pick, pack and ship online orders--most likely a short-term solution. The company will also have to grasp how online shoppers shop. Choosing products to splash on its home page isn't like stocking razor blades by the check-out. "This is where it's behind the learning curve," Cooperstein says...