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The
Rise of E-Commerce: Sure Thing or Recipe for Another 12-Step Program?
By Greg Coyle
Have
you seen this commercial about the housewife addicted to video poker?
In a succession of made-for-TV-movie-like scenes, we watch her wring
her hands at the demanding voice of a bill collector, exasperatedly
upend her purse on her dining room table, and then sit hunched and
bleary-eyed before one more bad hand at some Pabst and peanuts dive.
Now, either our heroine can't control her habit or she's just never
quite got the hang of the whole "suits and colors" thing.
Whichever, she's spending money the delicate hand of the commercial's
director has told us she doesn't have. And the moral of this sad
little drama? Give people ease of access where consumerism is concerned,
and like dogs at a 10-pound bag of Little Debbies, they'll consume
till they get sick.
Today, e-commerce is growing at the rate of an Eastern-block basketball
center. In medical terms, it's got a hyperthyroidism. In Wall Street
parlance, it's decidedly bullish (note the hit-with-a-bullet jump
of K-Tel stock from a paltry 6 ? in early April to 67 ? at the announcement
that the label would be making their 250,000-CD catalog available
online as of May 1. This news was followed by unconfirmed reports
that members of both Mr. Mister and the Starlight Vocal Band were
dusting off their outfits). And in common everyday streetspeak,
it's expanding like nobody's freakin' business. In 1997 alone, online
sales reportedly reached $3.3 billion. Estimates put that number
at $26 billion by 2002. By most accounts, the hot sellers online
include software/hardware, financial/insurance, books and travel.
It is also estimated that by 2002 upwards of seven million households
will even rely on the Web for their grocery shopping. And of course
we can't forget all the naughty bits, which, if you think about
it, are just another kind of software/hardware.
As for the e-commerce naysayers, of which there were many a few
years ago, by now they're likely either in jail for mailing letter
bombs, having failed to off themselves with the genius technology
of another era, the elastic-waisted brief, or they're peddling smoothies
at Orange Julius. Despite those with a taste for the more traditional
channels of commercial excess and debt, it seems the prognostications
of change are coming true: out beads and skins, in coins and paper;
out coins and paper, in plastic; and now, finally, it seems, out
plastic, and in, well, information. All you need today to impulse-buy
your way into a faked death and name change is a computer, Internet
access and credit card number. The sky is the limit. Don't let your
imagination be corralled by the limited offerings at your local
mall! (Plus, who likes inhaling the stale, sour odor of mass product
hunger that mall shoppers wear like a pheromone?) Avoid the great
unwashed and exercise your right as an American to buy, buy, buy
in private.
But pass it on. As consumerism relies as much as anything on what
the Jones' are doing, the gospel of Internet commerce is spreading
as fast as Clinton-Lewinsky jokes and rumors about so-and-so from
accounting's "habits." Tales of the Internet's inestimable
choice and ease are migrating into every SUV-dotted suburban neighborhood.
They're being passed on through the endlessly recirculated air and
around the nattily decorated cubicle walls of every workplace. You
can overhear them in every espresso line and at every movie starring
Leonardo DiCaprio, Harrison Ford or any cast member from the television
show "Friends." Everywhere, friends are relating to friends,
colleagues to colleagues, the glorious reality that America's real
pastime, shopping, is now as easily conducted at your computer as
anywhere.
And it's working. Where in 1997 there were 17 million households
tapping their way to consumer heaven via the Internet, that number
is expected to double to 34 million by 2001. At the same time, the
percentage of those households actually purchasing online is likely
to increase from 19 percent to nearly 50 percent. This includes
the purchase of just about everything purchasable by more traditional
means, including computer equipment, flowers, jewelry, Beanie Babies,
macramé vests, fake vomit, knicker-knockers, live badgers,
inspirational religious t-shirts, prosthetic limbs, hilarious office
paraphernalia like signs that say, "You want it when?,"
recipes for chicken marsala and fertilizer bombs, lambada lessons,
toupees, Hummel pieces, mud flaps, curious undergarments, and so
on.
Admittedly, there is some disagreement about how to most accurately
qualify the true e-commerce numbers. Do you measure only those sales
completed online? Should you include items shopped for on the Web
but actually purchased offline? And what about advertising and subscriptions?
And how about those things found on the street that may have been
purchased online? It's hard to know. In the end, such discussions
are about as important as deciding which Spice Girl is best, Sticky
or Gassy. They're all equally perfect. And so it is that regardless
of how you frame your analysis of e-commerce's future, it's bright,
bright, bright, as bright as the future of those cunning pharmaceutical
manufacturers behind Viagra. (But then where's the surprise there,
we've always known that economic success is turn-on.)
The Internet is, in short, the greatest sidewalk sale in human history.
Come one, come all! It's got everything under the sun, and it all
must GO, GO, GO! If there is a downside it is not the vast number
of choices e-commerce provides, though that can be paralyzing, or
even the ability of your random Joe or Jane to accommodate and navigate
the new technology. The threat is, instead, given America's insatiable
appetite for stuff and its collective ability to spend money it
doesn't have, that the e-commerce infrastructure will figure as
a kind of advanced video game to those who use it pitching headlong
into World Wide Waste. The commercial buzz is but a button away.
Cut back for a moment to the commercial of the beleaguered video
poker player. In continuing to facilitate such fluid exchange of
credit for merchandise, are we consigning ourselves to similar lives?
Unlikely. Still, let us not forget the sagely wisdom of Kenny Rogers
when he reminds us: "You must know when to hold 'em, know when
to fold 'em." Amen, Kenny, amen. And so we must.
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