Lilienfeld had reminded me that traditional malls and the cyber variety were different, and I understood. If I wanted to shop for books, I could brave traffic to reach Springfield Mall, a large collection of shops maybe ten miles from me in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Springfield would be worth the drive. I could visit four stores right within a five-minute walk of each other—Brentano’s, B. Dalton, Walden, and Crown.
The Net, however, was also different. I didn’t have to drive anywhere. I could just use a powerful search engine such as Lycos, key in “bookstore,” and watch name after name pop up on my screen. Lycos demanded just a little technical savvy. But easier alternatives would come along. As if that weren’t enough, Netfolks put together lists of activities on the Internet, and often they included commercial categories. I’d found White Rabbit not through advertising but through the Yahoo list out of Stanford University, on the other side of North America. Distance just didn’t matter. So could the shopping mall metaphor truly work out to the benefit of merchants such as Larry Grant?
Branch Mall at the very least had set Grant up in style. The opening screen was attractive and helpful to buyers, with such basics as: “Different areas of the country sometimes have different prices or may be unable to supply certain flowers. For example, New York City has high rents and costs of doing business, so flowers are more expensive there....” And then below I saw a list of the offerings—for example, “One dozen boxed long stem roses. A fragrant classic. $49.95 to $99.95.” In the virtual version of the White Rabbit toy store you couldn’t rattle the toys, and in Branch Mall you couldn’t smell the roses, but like the Lilienfelds, Branch Mall had been generous with pictures of the merchandise. I loved some little touches. Branch had given Grant a reminder service into which you could key your spouse’s birthday or some other date, before which an e-mail note would be sent to jog you to do your duty.
The selection was varied. You could order everything from the roses to “a get well soup cup containing button mums, daisies, mini carnations, standard carnations, monte casino, statice, and a package of chicken soup. $26.” All in all, I felt that this area was even better laid out than White Rabbit Toys, where the opening page, though far, far above average, didn’t communicate quite as much information as I’d have liked. As with White Rabbit, you could order online by filling out an electronic form.
Missing from the virtual version of Grant’s flower shop, however, were the customized links that helped give the White Rabbit Toys its personality and made it a true part of the Net. If Larry Grant had been as at home in cyberspace as Rob Lilienfeld was, he could have added links to love-oriented discussion areas or to poetry—perhaps even the Shakespearean variety.
But instead this Web page was serving just as an electronic billboard with an ordering mechanism. I didn’t even see a photograph of the store. When the New York Times published a photo of a Mosaic screen, it had superimposed a picture of Grant amid his flowers and dressed in an apron with an FTD insignia. Couldn’t a similar photo have adorned his Web area?
For that matter, the store didn’t even offer an electronic mail address, just a phone number for customers with questions. This isn’t to criticize Larry Grant. He was not an honorary techie as Bob Lilienfeld was. Like Lilienfeld, however, Grant was an intelligent, diligent Midwest businessman who saw the Net as an opportunity.
Wild talk about Grant notwithstanding, he wasn’t a braggart—simply a proud family entrepreneur. I learned that Grant’s Flowers was actually part of a mini local conglomerate. “We’ve been here since 1947,” he said, “and my folks started farming and selling produce by the side of the road off a kitchen table. We’re now a million-dollar business and have many facets. We have a flower and gift shop, and the front of the building is beer and foods. We farm 131 acres.” Two brothers were in the business, and so was his eighty-year-old mother. “She runs the flower and gift section, and I run the rest of the retail sales and my brothers do all the growing and production. We’ve got two acres of greenhouses growing plants for spring sale or gardeners. It’s a very diversified operation.”
Grant clearly wasn’t making a living off the Internet alone, despite a good start. “We got online in February just before Valentine’s Day and we received forty orders that week. In the first ten days we had over 2,900 look in on our electronic storefront. Then it dropped to one or two orders a day, and then we got to Mother’s Day and had a high of forty in one day. Currently we’ve increased from one or two to six, in that range.”
When I asked what his current Net-related gross would be per year, he roughly estimated it at perhaps $15,000 or $20,000. That was enough to make the Web area well worth his time, but this was hardly a tale of instant riches. I remembered a magazine ad—for would-be providers of Internet services—that showed a mustached man beside a Rolls or Mercedes. Larry Grant was a Web merchant, not someone hooking people up with the Net. But I wished that the get-rich-quickers of all stripes could see Larry Grant as a realistic example of the Net’s promise. The gold might come eventually, and it was worthwhile to chase after it by going online, but, for most people, the big money wasn’t there yet.