Word: shelfful
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Einstein was brilliant, of course, but he was also lucky. When he developed the general theory of relativity, he dealt with a world that had just three spatial dimensions plus time. As a result, he could use off-the-shelf mathematics to develop and solve his equations. M theorists can't: their science resides in an 11-dimensional world that is filled with weird objects called branes. Strings, in this nomenclature, are one-dimensional branes; membranes are two-dimensional branes. But there are also higher-dimensional branes that no one, including Witten, quite knows how to deal with. For these...
Your order is transmitted to the closest facility that has the products. Amazon's newest, in McDonough, Ga., opened in October and stocks more than a million items. Rows of red lights show which products are ordered. Workers move from bulb to bulb, retrieving an item from the shelf above an pressing a button that resets the light. Computers determine which workers go where...
Plenty of reasons suggest that e-tail will crush retail. Take selection. There are the infinite miles of infinite shelf space that Amazon's Jeff Bezos loves to cackle about. And there's no need to set up those costly stores, with rent and utility bills due every month and a sales force to handle those pesky customers...
Instead, there is a cyberstore that never closes and is more likely to have what you desire in stock because of 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...
Then, in July, European authorities conducted a series of dawn raids on Coke facilities from the Continent to Britain in search of evidence that the company was offering retailers illegal kickbacks for favored shelf space. That investigation is ongoing. And last month French authorities rejected Ivester's $840 million bid for the Orangina soft-drink business. Observes John Quelch, dean of the London Business School: "The power of global brands may be strong, but they are not strong enough to preclude the need to cultivate [government] relationships at the national level...