History
The home shopping/electronic retailing industry was created in 1977, when small market talk radio show host Bob Circosta was asked to sell avocado-green-colored can openers live on the air by station owner Bud Paxson, when an advertiser traded 112 units of product instead of paying his advertising bill. Hesitant at first, Circosta reluctantly obliged – and to both men's great surprise, all 112 can openers sold out within the hour. Paxson sensed the vast sales potential of home-based commerce, and founded the world's first shopping channel on cable television, later launching nationwide with the Home Shopping Network (rebranded as HSN). Bob Circosta was America's first ever TV home shopping host,becoming one of the most instantly recognizable salesmen in the Free World. Over the next three decades, Circosta sold over 75,000 different products on HSN, netted over 20,000 hours of live, on-air TV selling, and achieved personal product sales in excess of one billion dollars. The classic television-based home shopping industry quickly became a major player in the retail industry. The two most successful shopping channels – HSN and QVC – generate a combined total of over 10 billion dollars in sales every year. And Jewelry Television is the largest gemstone retailer in the world.
Amazon.com began as an online bookstore in 1994, created by Wall Street computer scientist Jeff Bezos. In addition to books, Amazon eventually added video games, computer software, electronics, apparel, and more to its sales repertoire. The company now generates approximately eight-and-a-half billion dollars annually.
Read more about this topic: Home Shopping
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)
“A man will not need to study history to find out what is best for his own culture.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There is a history in all men’s lives,
Figuring the natures of the times deceased,
The which observed, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)