Word: year
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Toys "R" Us was at first regarded as an industry joke, its website plagued by overcrowding and inadequate order fulfillment. KBkids.com didn't even exist last year. The space belonged to eToys, the first online retailer to design a truly kid-friendly toy site. Kids could create electronic wish lists, gifts came wrapped, batteries came included. "I saw immediately that here was a channel that could revolutionize how you serve the toy market," says eToys CEO Toby Lenk...
...line toy retailers, that kind of problem solving was intimidating enough to keep them on the sidelines during the holiday season, caroling that the Web was just a passing phase. As late as last year, Robert Nakasone, then Toys "R" Us CEO, was more eager to talk about store redesign than Web strategy. Toys "R" Us has had problems with its stores...
...last Christmas, eToys proved you could sell Barbies and Brio trains on the Web, doing $20 million in sales and capturing more than 50% of the online toy biz. So this year off-line players had no choice but to go cyber and--surprise, surprise--they've been up to the task. Toys "R" Us, the bumbling, old-economy slow mover, has in the past two quarters come on like light sabers in the toy space, setting up a subsidiary, Toysrus.com and prepping that company to go public sometime next year...
...Mart every week. The nation's top retailer sells everything from sweatpants to string beans, rakes to Ritalin. It keeps its prices low, its 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...
...first strike is planned for New Year's Day, when Wal-Mart has said it will launch a redesign of the site, adding photo and travel services and expanding the menu to 600,000 items (superstores typically stock about 100,000). The company also promises to link the site to its 2,485 stores in 50 states, allowing online purchases to be returned off-line. "We'll even refund the shipping charges," says Glenn Habern, Wal-Mart's Web war chief...