Word: new
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...from scouting estate sales and flea markets. From a cramped, windowless cubicle, he monitors the hundreds of auctions he has posted--moving anywhere from $40,000 to $75,000 a month. He has hired a full-time employee to oversee his eBay business and plans to move to a new space complete with a miniprocessing center...
...evidence suggests that eBay represents a return to that earlier one-on-one sociability--and maybe even improves on it, since the Net collapses the traditional divisions of geography and class. Wherever you plant your modem, the fabled new economy arrives--even in the boonies, as Patricia Hoyt calls her hometown of Baker, Mont., roughly 225 miles from the nearest big city, Billings. The old economy of oil and cattle has not been kind to Baker, and when oil prices dropped, business dried up at the motel Hoyt and her husband...
...Hoyt had a hobby: making decorative glass beads. Thanks to eBay, her hobby is now her livelihood. She sells as many as 3,000 beads a month, for as much as $50 each. eBay has given her more than a new career. She refers without irony to the bead community she has discovered online. Glass beads have spawned an entire network of chat groups and e-mail lists. Many of her customers buy weekly. "If I don't put up any auctions for a week," she says, "they'll write...
...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 e-tailer, put it, "We could be global from...
Economists get dizzy thinking 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...