Word: pez
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...brand-new nickname: "Fer. Pez" b) A surprise private concert by Luther Vandross c) Front-row seats at New York State Supreme Court d) One last chance to come crawling back...
...Together they began to bring in more employees--techies, customer-support staff, finance people. In those early days, eBay--operating then as now out of a bland San Jose, Calif., office park--was a goofily informal place to work. Decor ran to Star Wars figures and giant papier-mache Pez dispensers, a wedding gift when Pierre and Pam tied the knot. The first employees had to assemble their own desks, and everyone sat on fold-up beach chairs. Work ground to a halt at 3 p.m. for Nerf soccer games...
...began with Pez and a man named Pierre Omidyar, now 32. In the summer of 1995 Omidyar's fiance (now wife) Pam, who collected Pez dispensers, was bemoaning how hard it was to find other people to trade with in the San Francisco Bay Area. Omidyar was already an e-commerce pioneer (Microsoft eventually bought out eShop, a company he co-founded), but lately he had been wrestling with how the Internet could be used to create fairer markets. The Pez dilemma led Omidyar to the flash of an idea: an Internet auction site could function as the ultimate efficient...
...some code and over Labor Day weekend of 1995 launched what he called AuctionWeb, which was supported on the $30-a-month Internet service provider he was hooked up to from home. (The site's domain name was www.ebay.com and eBay was the name that stuck.) There were no Pez dispensers--that came later--but there were listings for a whole lot of computer hardware. eBay started out free, but it quickly attracted so much traffic that Omidyar's Internet service upped his monthly bill to $250. Now that it was costing him real money, Omidyar decided to start charging...
Moreover, eBay has exposed America as a nation of collectors. Matchbook covers, cast-iron witches' cauldrons, Pez dispensers, pneumatic grease pumps from the 1920s, Three Stooges memorabilia--you name it, some American somewhere collects it. "We define ourselves by our stuff," says Robert Thompson, president of the Popular Culture Association and a Syracuse University professor who specializes in the study of collectibles. In a democracy, with everyone theoretically equal, people want to be different. We don't have a caste system; we've never had a blood-line aristocracy. We've distinguished ourselves by our cars, by the clothes...