Word: want
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Omidyar says he tried to imbue eBay with a "founding culture" based on the moral principles he absorbed in childhood. "My mother always taught me to treat other people the way I want to be treated and to have respect for other people," he says. "Those are just good basic values to have in a crowded world." As it happened, there were also good business reasons to carry the Golden Rule into cyberspace. Unlike traditional e-tailers, who can control the consumer's experience, eBay is almost completely dependent on how users interact. "We really have to encourage our customers...
...says the trick to solving some of the world's problems is to think, Amazon-like, in the long term. "Say you want to solve world hunger. If you think in terms of a five-year time frame, you get really depressed; it's an intractable problem. But if you say, well, let's see how we could solve this in 100 years--it's a problem because you'll be dead by then, but the solution becomes more tractable...
...from the 1920s, Three Stooges memorabilia--you name it, some American somewhere collects it. "We define ourselves by our stuff," says Robert Thompson, president of the Popular Culture Association and a Syracuse University professor who specializes in the study of collectibles. In a democracy, with everyone theoretically equal, people want to be different. We don't have a caste system; we've never had a blood-line aristocracy. We've distinguished ourselves by our cars, by the clothes we wear, by the stuff we buy and sell. "I suppose you can lament all the consumerist tendencies in this, the materialism...
...shelves stocked and its big, wide aisles peppered with blue-smocked clerks. The company will ring up about $160 billion in domestic sales by year's end, with profits on track to top $5 billion. With that kind of scratch--and a proven knack for giving people what they want--the House That Sam Built seems a shoo-in for success in cyberspace...
...Evanston, Ill., who pointed her mouse at Peapod.com a year ago and never looked back. "It has changed my life," she says. "Instead of running into a store with a kid under each arm, trying desperately to avoid a meltdown, buying 20 things I didn't want, I've got the time to think about what I need. It's made me a better shopper...