Clicks And Bricks

Think of every Baby Tap-A-Tune piano or Makeup Pretty Angelica picked by the yellow-capped pickers, packed by the blue-hatted packers and loaded by the gray-brimmed loaders at this 100,000-sq.-ft. eToys warehouse in Commerce, Calif., as another round fired in the retail-vs.-e-tail battle. Christmas is always war in the toy industry, and nowhere more so this year than online, where pure e-tailers like eToys are for the first time fighting on several fronts.

Attacking from the Internet is Amazon.com the Web superstore that began selling toys this summer and plans to do to eToys what it did to CDnow in the online music business--knock it out of the top spot. Attacking from the street as well as from cyberspace are the classic "bricks-and-mortar" retailers Toys "R" Us and KB Toys, which were written off as Net players after the last holiday season but this year have developed online offshoots.

In the 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.

Plenty of reasons suggest that e-tail will crush retail. Take selection. There are the infinite miles of infinite shelf space that Amazon's Jeff Bezos loves to cackle about. And there's no need to set up those costly stores, with rent and utility bills due every month and a sales force to handle those pesky customers.

Instead, there is a cyberstore that never closes and is more likely to have what you desire in stock because of that infinite shelf space and the millions of square feet of cheap warehouse real estate in Utah or Nevada. "The pure Internet plays don't have nearly the infrastructure cost that off-line plays do," says Mike May, an analyst at Jupiter Communications, an e-commerce research firm in New York City. "A single point of sale can be used to reach an entire country or the entire world." As Jay Herratti, president of Boo.com North America, a sportswear e-tailer, put it, "We could be global from Day One."

Economists get dizzy thinking about this. It is all so scalable. Add a few servers, a dozen more Web pages, a couple more customer-service reps, run your traffic up another digit, expand into new product lines and sell a hundred thousand more books or CDs or power tools. This kind of growth--Internet gurus like David Wetherell, enthralled by the mathematics of community, call it viral growth--defies conventional valuation and makes the usual measure of retailing--same-store sales, sales per square foot--seem like roman numerals or the abacus, relics of another age.