The Cart Blog

Blast from the Past

Here’s Clifford Stohl explaining why e-commerce will never work back in 1995:

Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obsolete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

Yes, what could be better than a salesperson hovering over you anxiously awaiting their commission.