Jedi Outcast. Fun Game.
Posted on 06/14/2002 9:57:45 AM PDT by Temple Owl
Candy-coated eBay tale was too good to be true
By Mike Cassidy
Mercury News
It's almost hard to remember the days when a tale about Pez and the Internet could get the heart racing.
But the story of San Jose's own eBay getting its start because Pierre Omidyar wanted a better way to trade Pez dispensers was such a beaut.
Too good to be true in fact, as we're now reading in Adam Cohen's new book, ``The Perfect Store: Inside eBay.''
Yep. The story of eBay, the online auction house, and Pez, the novelty candy, is a fib. A fabrication. Another blast of Internet hype.
Look it's not Enron, but the debunking of eBay's myth is a reminder of just how ga-ga over the New Economy investors, business folks and, yes, reporters once were.
New Economy. It sounds so old now. And let's just say its legends are playing to a tougher crowd.
Toss the eBay story on the heap with the notion that companies that don't make money can still be successful and the idea that the stock market only goes up.
But they were all good stories and in the late '90s there was nothing better than a good Silicon Valley story.
It was part of the grander myth of the boom: get-rich-quick, easy money, build-it-and-they-will-buy-it.
The Pez story was a real talker. It started showing up widely in the summer of 1998. It hit Newsday the first week of June. It then appeared in Business Week, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Mercury News and hundreds of other papers.
Former Vice President Al Gore fell for it and used it in a November 1998 speech:
``Who would have imagined that someone who simply wanted to find other people who were also interested in collecting Pez candy dispensers -- you remember them -- would become eBay . . .''
I'll tell you who would have imagined it: eBay's first PR person. And she imagined it good.
In Cohen's book, ``The Perfect Store: Inside eBay'' (Little, Brown and Co., $25.95 or eight bucks -- slightly used -- on eBay), Mary Lou Song admits she cooked up the Pez story in 1997 to drum up interest among reporters who didn't find eBay terribly interesting.
EBay confirms the account.
And me? I'm claiming right here to be the first reporter Song pezzed. (Call it my own creation myth.)
In the summer of 1997, I called Song and asked how Omidyar came up with eBay. She told me she had just recently heard the real story from Omidyar himself. He wanted to help his fiancee, Pam Wesley, Song said at the time.
``She's a Pez collector,'' Song continued. (And, in fact, she really did collect the dispensers.) ``He told me that there was this one time they were in France and she had scooped up all this Pez. I guess they drove away, like 15 minutes, and she said, `Oh my gosh, I missed one.' ''
And there had to be a better way, right?
``I think of it as kind of a love token to help her trade -- and to save some gas mileage,'' Song said then.
It was so sweet. And so cool. Starting a whole company over love and Pez.
In the end, I didn't write the Pez story. Instead, I wrote about two women who met while shopping on eBay.
I'd like to say I passed on the Pez story because I'm brilliant and saw it as hooey from the start. In fact, it's somewhat the opposite.
I didn't want to write about eBay as a business because it struck me as the craziest idea I'd ever heard. Never last, I thought.
Can you believe it?
Ok, he didnt say it, but come on, how long can you stay alive with the losses Amazon is incurring.
Seriously people, how many websites that you visit on a daily basis would you actually pay a monthly or yearly subscription fee too? I donate to FR, but it is the only site i would even consider paying for access.
``Who would have imagined that someone who simply wanted to find other people who were also interested in collecting Pez candy dispensers -- you remember them -- would become eBay . . .''
...and who can forget that it would not have been possible if I had not invented the internet. You may not know this, but I also invented the Pez dispenser. I got the idea from watching my Father give speaches while spewing out pork."
My mother got laid off back in September. Now she spends her time (between job interviews) buying huge lots of Cherished Teddies (which are big business) on eBay, then reselling them (she keeps some too). She has found a lot of valuable ones cheap and now has a very valuable collection. She has turned my brother's old room into an inventory room and even keeps detailed computer records on her stock. She makes a small profit, but more importantly, she loves doing it.
Jedi Outcast. Fun Game.
What I would like to find is a really good Drag Racing game.
Obviously, you don't know even that much about the internet. Have you EVEN used Ebay? Or for that matter, played an online multiplayer game?
How many music sites fit that catagory?
BWAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHA!
OK now I got THAT outta my system...
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