Word: timing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Andersen study, were giant chains trying to jump on the online bandwagon (but perhaps leaving their hearts in the mall). Even when the big bricks-and-mortar stores managed to get the online orders right, there was a 75% chance that the goods wouldn't arrive on time. Toys "R" Us, realizing three days before Christmas that it could not make good on its delivery promises, issued free $100 gift certificates to customers left in the lurch...
This is not to say that first-time Web shoppers hated the experience more than they hate trudging through the mall. The e-stores must have been doing something right; early indicators point to a $12 billion cyber Christmas, way beyond the most optimistic preseason estimates. And since nobody had a clue as to how many folks would actually buy online this year, it's not surprising that a quarter of the orders got trampled in the ensuing stampede...
Some sites, of course, were better prepared than others. By bringing on enough servers to handle peak-load traffic, the best avoided "site busy" messages and snail-like downloads. They also kept puzzled shoppers from fleeing by providing an 800 number or offering real-time Instant Messaging chats with customer reps. And they avoided apoplectic rages by "integrating" their inventory systems so that what appears to be in stock on the website corresponds with what's actually on the shelves...
...continent. In downtown Toronto, on a jam-packed sidewalk, a blue-robed Chinese monk is knocking clappers ceremoniously together. Amid all the promiscuous minglings of our mishmashed global order, the most confusing ones often arise not when cultures clash but when centuries do, with their different senses of time. The modern Everyplace is the wall of a luxury hotel, where clocks show seven different times at once...
...pundits tell us that the central division in our transnational world is between the "slow" cultures of the plow and the "fast" ones of the microchip, the gap between them accelerating at an unprecedented rate. But what is more of a vexation in our modern times--a temporal Tower of Babel, as you could call it--is that everything's mixed up: fast and slow are present in every country, often, and in every household. Ancient cultures, as in India and China, are eager to invite the future to come to stay, so long as it doesn't interfere with...