Word: profiteering
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...under Roosevelt's wartime leadership, the government entered into the most productive partnership with private enterprise the country had ever seen, bringing top businessmen in to run the production agencies, exempting business from antitrust laws, allowing business to write off the full cost of investments and guaranteeing a substantial profit. The output was staggering. By 1943, American production had not only caught up with Germany's 10-year lead but America was also outproducing all the Axis and the Allied powers combined, contributing nearly 300,000 planes, 100,000 tanks, 2 million trucks and 87,000 warships to the Allied...
...full view of anyone with a modem and a yen to bid on the clothes she puts up for auction. Bids race through cyberspace, winners are declared, and Wicker mails the goods to the lucky buyers--and cashes their money orders and cashier's checks, sometimes for a tidy profit and always with the thrill of a successful sale. "I've been waiting for eBay my whole life," she says...
...eBay makes a lot of people happy, and not just because it makes some people rich. The surprise--in more enthusiastic moments, you might even call it the miracle--of eBay is that it offers online consumers something rarer, more essential, more enduring than a chance to make a profit...
...parlance of the Web, Toys "R" Us and KB Toys are "clicks-and-mortar" businesses, combining their retail stores with online versions. Retail observers and investors are watching this holiday season closely for clues as to which type of operation is better positioned to serve customers and make a profit in the 21st century--the eToys model, which operates online only, or the Toys "R" Us version, with which old-fashioned chains are finally forging a Web presence...
...first three (recently issued in a hardcover omnibus by Knopf/Everyman's Library) have the tone of high, dark comedy. Tom kills--Dickie, Dickie's pal Freddie Miles, an American art lover, a bunch of mafiosi--as much for the game of eluding capture as for motives of profit or survival. In Ripley's Game he gets an ailing man involved in a murder plot only because the man once spoke abruptly to Tom. Then, when the man desperately tries to kill a Mafia goon, who shows up to help but Ripley? Good deeds or bad, they're just caprices...