Word: thorsen
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Where's the trendiest place to shop these days? Try your closet. To wit: Kelly Thorsen, a school secretary from Lakeland, Fla., needed a nice pair of boots for the holiday season. A new pair would have cost some $200, and a splurge was not an option for the mother of two. "Last year, I might have gone out and started looking around," says Thorsen, 46. "Now we are being a lot more careful with where our dollars are being spent. To go out and purchase a new pair of boots was not in my realm." (See the 25 people...
...pride a bit. "I walked in with my tail between my legs," she says. "It was something, initially, I was not proud of." Then she saw the price: $16. And the work: the boots looked as good as new. "I walked out of there going, 'O.K., all right,'" Thorsen says. She proudly wore her healed heels to all her holiday parties. (Read how much it costs to get your shoes custom-made by some of the world's best and most famous cobblers...
...will be no next year. Last week Reel.com's headquarters in Emeryville, Calif., was like a ghost town. Every last one of the site's 230 employees had got a pink slip the previous week. Some, in a rush or in disgust, hadn't even cleaned out their cubicles. Thorsen and 14 others remained as independent contractors, keeping the site running while its owner, Hollywood Entertainment, based in Portland, Ore., worked out the details of how to give it a decent burial...
...full flush of the revolution, Hollywood ponied up $100 million for Reel.com Now, with the site's IPO canceled because of lack of interest and venture capital running dry, its e-commerce operations were halted. That left Thorsen's 32,000 shares worthless. "I used to think about buying a house and paying off my student loans," he says. "Now I'm thinking about unemployment...
When his contract runs out in a month, Thorsen will hardly be the only dotcom refugee standing in line. Nor will he be the only one cursing his valueless options. This has always been a highly volatile industry, but recent events have been on the scale of a virtual earthquake. Here's a sample of the casualty list for just two days last week: More than a third of Seattle-based Hardware.com's workers went under the hammer. Furniture.com in Framingham, Mass., laid off 80 employees--that's 41% of its work force. Streaming video site Pseudo.com axed 58 jobs...