Word: retailing
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This year you'll buy about $15 billion worth of consumer goods online. Businesses will spend an additional $109 billion buying from one another. And while those numbers are but a small part of the overall retail economy--which clocks in at $2.7 trillion--e-business is rapidly replacing the traditional kind for almost any purchase you can imagine. By the time the ribbons are off the packages this week, Americans will have spent $5 billion online for holiday gifts--more than twice as much as last year...
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...
Jeff Bezos loves being on the move. He sits in the back of a white van, beaming as usual, surrounded by an entourage of lanky young lieutenants from Amazon.com the Web's biggest retail store and, someday, if Bezos gets it right, Earth's Biggest Store. The early-morning landscape of southeast Kansas hustles by: wood-frame houses, trailers, motels with lots of pickup trucks in their parking lots, a Kum & Go convenience store, cow pastures and the dull, forever flatness of the prairie. You've heard of places described as cow towns? Coffeyville was actually labeled Cow Town...
Bezos & Co. conceived an entirely new way of thinking about the ancient art of retailing, from creating a "flow experience" that keeps customers coming back to Amazon's website to read product reviews or one another's "wish lists," to automating as much as possible a complex process that starts when you hit the patent-protected "1-Click" buy technology and ends when your purchase is delivered to your door. The Coffeyville center, for instance, is part of a nationwide distribution network specially designed to handle e-commerce. Half a dozen warehouses like it have been strategically placed...
...Wall Street announced a measure of approval: Rite Aid stock closed at $11.50, up about $3 for the week. And with baby boomers and senior citizens fueling a boom in prescription drugs, Miller is confident he can cure Rite Aid's ills: "This is the fastest growing sector in retail." Now if he can just impose some financial discipline, he might be able to keep pace with...