scale. Just as the newspaper industry dreamed of delivering its product without the need for costly delivery and production expenses, a forward-thinking retailer could dream of a world without the need for costly commercial real estate expenses and perhaps vastly simplified warehousing and logistics costs. To early commerce pioneers, the promise wasn’t that the web would allow them to do something fundamentally different than before—this was still about selling goods to consumers—but that it could radically transform the way they would do it.
