Word: thingness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Community" is an overworked term, too often applied artificially to any motley of people who share a skin color, an income level or a set of political bugaboos. But from the limitless ether of cyberspace, eBay has managed to conjure up the real thing. For many people, eBay does what communities have traditionally done. It not merely provides them financial sustenance but also draws them together with like-minded folk, offering encouragement, rewarding unique talents and interests, giving an outlet for their eccentricities and individuality and in some cases rescuing them from the margins where they would otherwise languish alone...
...permit them to do all three." Companies such as Circuit City and eToys' competitors KB Toys and Toys "R" Us are proving they're not out of the game. "Clicks-and-mortar has a lot of inherent advantages," says Seema Williams, e-commerce analyst at Forrester Research. "For one thing, an existing, powerful brand presence. It's going to be awful tough for an online retailer to maintain its lead once the clicks-and-mortar people get their act together...
...that an interstate full of delivery trucks will spell the death of your mall. "People will go shopping in stores as a social activity," predicts high-tech guru Esther Dyson, but "there may be a lot of showrooms and fewer places where you actually take things home." Should you buy off-line, automatic in-store bar-code scanning may make checkout lines a thing of the past...
There were a few hitches. Everything had to come from the Internet, no going to the store, and I would have to write about it. There's no such thing as a free dinner...
...Lincoln Navigator, and you find that even the chastened Ventura is more candid than 99% of pols. On the Cuban trade embargo he says what self-styled truth tellers like Bill Bradley don't: "It's stupid. Fidel's outlasted eight Presidents. Is it an ego thing? Do we have to wait for him to die?" He's the rare non-Democratic Governor who gives Clinton generous credit for the economy. Try getting George W. Bush to do that...