ECW6

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ECW6

Issue 6, December 9, 1999

+++Dixons - a Christmas mystery

+++In praise of fat, dumb pipes

+++The Dixons experience

+++Clicks or mortar

+++Caviar comes from burgeon

+++Dixons - a Christmas mystery

The Dixons Group is the largest electrical retailer in Britain and one of the largest in Europe. At the time of its 1988/9 annual report it consisted of:Dixons Retail Group, comprising:

Dixons (cameras, PCs and other electronic goods),

The Link (telephones) and @jakarta (games consoles and software)

Currys (domestic appliances, televisions, hi-fi, PCs and other electronic goods)

PC World (computer superstores)

Mastercare (service and repair of what the group sells)

Freeserve (Internet service provision)

property development in Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany and France. (This was small scale, with an operating profit of £8.0 million.)

The group had 987 stores at its year end, 1 May 1999. These were all in the United Kingdom, except for six in the Republic of Ireland.

++Competition

Dixon's biggest British competitor is the Kingfisher Group. This was previously the British element of the Woolworths empire, changing its name in 1989. It operates in three main sectors:

home maintenance (including B&Q)

electrical goods (including Darty in France and Comet in the UK

general UK high-street retailing (including Woolworths and Superdrug)

Like Dixons, Kingfisher also engages in property development in mainland Europe. This is on a slightly larger scale, producing an operating profit of £69.1 million.

A comparison of the performance of the two organizations can be seen in the financial results.

Results (1998/9)	Dixons Group	Kingfisher
		Electrical	Group
Turnover	£3,156.3	£2,458.1	£7,457.8
Profits	£231.3	£173.4	£629.3
Sales profitability	7.3%	7.1%	8.4%
5-yr turnover growth	13.8%	9.6%	8.8%
5-yr profits growth	18.2%	11.1%	18.6%
Number of stores	987	698	2,742
Employees (EFT)	24,628	21,192	78,133
Sales/employee*	£128,000	£116,000	£95,450
Profit/employee*	£9,400	£8,200	£8,050
Number of non-UK stores	6 (<1% of group total)	427 (63% of sector total)	645 (24%)
Non-UK turnover	n/a	£1,595.7 (65%)	£1,769.6 (24%)
Non-UK profits	n/a	£140.0 (81%)	£142.6 (23%)
Non-UK sales profitability	n/a	8.8%	8.1%

*rounded figures

++Analysis

There are some broad similarities evident between Kingfisher's electrical sector and Dixons. Their sales profitability was nearly the same and their respective turnover and profit per employee figures were within about 10% of each other.

One obvious difference is in their longer-term records. Dixons has sustained, on average, a growth in both turnover and profits that is at least 50% faster over the past five years than Kingfisher's electrical shops. (The group figure for Kingfisher, though, slightly exceeds Dixons' in terms of profits growth.)

The other clear difference is in the distribution of the respective groups' stores. Kingfisher is an avowedly international operation, and intends to become more so. The bulk of its electrical stores are in mainland Europe (France and Germany); the group operates in eleven countries in total. Dixons, at the time, operated shops only in the British Isles.

Obviously, a few figures gleaned from annual reports do not present a full or necessarily balanced picture of either organization but some things can be safely concluded from this data and from other evidence.

The first is that Dixons is a successful and profitable operation. It is the largest in its chosen market and it outperformed its major competitor in all the measures shown above. Its shareholders are invariably happy with the dividends they receive, and analysts give it good marks.

Dixon's chairman, Sir Stanley Kalms, is without doubt one of Britain's most successful shopkeepers. The company began in 1937 as a photographic studio in Southend, Essex, having been set up by Kalms's father. By 1950, the son had become chairman and diverted the company into selling cameras and accessories, both by mail order and from its shops. Through his abilities and efforts, Dixons is now one of Britain's largest retailers and is listed in the Financial Times's FTSE 100. It is the country's biggest seller of personal computers and, in terms of subscribers, its biggest ISP (see below).

++Europe

The second obvious conclusion is that Dixons is UK-centric. It is hard to tell whether this stems entirely from the attitudes of its chairman. Kalms is a well-known Eurosceptic. He speaks out against European Monetary Union at frequent intervals and is treasurer of a group opposed to it, called Business for Sterling. He is also a supporter of the Conservative Party and is one of their largest donors (although the Dixons Group itself makes no political donations). He was knighted during the last Conservative government.

There are several possible reasons for this single-country focus. One of the advantages that supporters of the euro hold out for it is that it enables price transparency. In other words, consumers can do a like-for-like comparison of prices across shops within the eurozone. Coincidentally, every so often Dixons is the target of an accusation that it either overprices its products or uses its purchasing power to maintain high prices generally within its sector. (The press releases of the company Web site mentions several instances of the group's rebuttals of these accusations.)

Another reason might be bad experience. In 1987 Dixons bought the American retail group, Silo. This was not a successful move. Six years later it sold off 70% of Silo's parent company, Dixons US Holdings Inc, to the probable relief of the company's board and shareholders.

The cause is unlikely to be xenophobia. In the early days of Dixons, Stanley Kalms regularly went to the Far East. He built the company's photographic business on the base of smart negotiating with Japanese suppliers to supply and make its own label 'Prinz' products. The company also keeps a local representative in Japan as an employee of Dixons Asia Limited.

Whatever the reason had been, Dixons appears to have changed its views. At the end of November 1999, Dixons bought the Scandinavian group, Elkjøp, for £444 million (reportedly topping a bid from Kingfisher). Elkjøp is the largest electrical retailer in the Nordic region, with 154 stores. It trades under its own name and that of Lefdal Lavpris in Norway, and as El-Giganten in Sweden and Denmark. It also has a new Finnish shop. Dixons will use the purchases as a way to establish the PC World stores and, possibly, The Link in northern Europe. (Details, in English, are available at Elkjøp's page on the Hugin service: http://www.huginonline.no/try/plsql/use$com.queryview?P_IDENTIFIER=766627&p_la=5.)

++Innovation

It is not obvious from the figures quoted above, but it is so from broader evidence, that Dixons is an innovative retailer. It was, its annual report says, the first UK retailer to stock digital satellite and terrestrial television decoders and the first in the world to offer integrated digital televisions. In October 1999, it launched the Dixons Select channel on Open, the new UK digital television shopping service.

Its greatest recent innovation by a long chalk was the setting up of Freeserve in September 1998. By creating an ostensibly free Internet service, it capsized the UK Internet market and within weeks had more subscribers than AOL, the market leader, which had been in Britain since 1996. The company reports having 1.48 million active registered Freeserve accounts at 26 September 1999 and is estimated to have around 35% of the UK market.

AOL and many other companies, including BT and the BBC, have since followed suit. Durlacher Research has predicted that there will be as many as 200 free ISPs operating in the UK by the end of 1999. ('Free' Internet services are only ostensibly free because the telephone company that handles the call to the 'free' Web site remits a substantial proportion of the call charge back to the ISP. Where call time is free, as in the USA, ISPs have to find another way of making money, such as from advertising insertions.)

Since its inception, Freeserve has:

had a successful public offering of a fifth of its stock, leaving the rest with Dixons. 50,000 people applied for Freeserve shares, and the offer was thirty times oversubscribed. Dixons is reckoned to have made £200 million from the offering.

teamed up with HFC Bank, a subsidiary of Household International, to launch an Internet credit card. HFC is the money behind the Goldfish and GM credit cards.

set up Freeserve Auctions, in collaboration with Auctions.com, for online person-to-person and merchant-to-person auction services.

in December 1999, made a strategic alliance with BT Cellnet to offer email and news through mobile phones. (Cellnet has a 40 % stake in The Link, dating from April 1997. This may be one of the reasons why Vodafone AirTouch, Britain's largest mobile 'phone company, does not offer access to its network through The Link and set up its own chain of shops.)

The PR pages at Freeserve's Web site, at http://www.freeserve.co.uk/cserve/pressreleases/, carry fuller details of its activities.

++On the other hand...

Amid all this commercial sharpness, one is confronted by the fact that two of the company's main brands - Dixons and PC World - have Web sites that would have looked ordinary two years ago and that a third - Currys - has no Web site at all. Ordering from either the Dixons or PC World site is hard work. Also, only trade customers are allowed to buy PCs from the PC World site; consumers can buy only software and furniture.

Two of Dixons' high street competitors, Comet and Tempo, have better-looking, less restrictive and more easily navigated sites. There are also several online specialists who do as well or better at making Web shopping interesting, enjoyable and fast.

The Dixons group would appear to be concentrating its ecommerce efforts and investment into its newer brands Freeserve, The Link and @jakarta and into the Dixons Select TV channel. This is despite the company's claim, at the launch of the TV channel, that it "remains committed to making its products and services available across all the main electronic shopping platforms." It is noticeable, for instance, that although the group is an incessant and inescapable advertiser for its older retail operations, it does not seem to advertise on the Web, other than on its own sites.

Could this lopsided approach be through fear of scavenging business from its traditional channels? Possibly Dixons feels that there is limited growth possible in the British market for its older lines. This may also explain its sudden move into overseas markets. If having grotty Web sites and poor ecommerce capabilities on them is deliberate, it perhaps hopes to persuade shoppers to walk to its shops instead. (Planned e-neptitude, a true Internet-age concept.)

Experience in America suggests that this would be a dangerous approach. A bad Web site succeeds only in damaging a company's image. By contrast, a good Web site is a good advertisement, even if people do not always use its ecommerce capabilities. Many people still window-shop on the Web and then go into a real shop to buy (a point lost on Hycel Partners in the USA. See Clicks or mortar, this issue).

It is hard to believe that someone as shrewd as Stanley Kalms would deliberately try something as crass as this. The company that so successfully ambushed the ISP market in 1998 is not suddenly going to become Web-stupid. Perhaps Dixons' intentions will become evident early in the new year. Meanwhile, it's not making the most of the expected e-Christmas rush.

-oOo-

+++In praise of fat dumb pipes

Peter Judge kindly allowed me space in his mighty organ this week to burble about the virtues of low cost wireless broadband networking [ http://www.zdnet.co.uk/itweek/brief/1999/48/network/ ]. My general thesis was that cheap broadband networking could and should be a significant contributor to economic development, particularly in the Third World.

Bill MacPherson of Holland College read the piece and sent me a note about David Isenberg's delightful site: http://www.isen.com. Isenberg's site is subtitled "Rethinking the value of networks in an era of abundant infrastructure". His mission statement reads: "Technology changes today are creating new, discontinuous, unrecognized business opportunities." Isenberg uses a different type of network to illustrate his point.

In 1973, Fred Smith failed to impress his instructors at the Harvard Business School with his analysis of the package delivery business from first principles. But a paper that almost failed became the blueprint for Federal Express. (Roger comments: "The full comment supposedly was: "The concept is interesting and well formed, but in order to earn better than a 'C,' the idea must be feasible." You'll find it all over the place, part of the same set of erroneous predictions that people all over the place seem to take as a package (no pun intended) but I've never seen this mythical professor named. I'll remain sceptical until he is.")

Smith saw in the aviation industry of the 1970s an expanding network with rapidly increasing capacity. His insight was a reversal of the existing package delivery model. The Post Office was cheap but time-insensitive. Smith used the developing air traffic network to propose a service for customers who were more time conscious than cost conscious. This, of course, was not conceptually new. The Romans maintained an express post service and, in America, Pony Express offered the trade of time for money. It was a PR success but a financial failure.

It is probably no co-incidence that FedEx was an early adopter of the Web technologies to allow users to track a parcel in real time. Interestingly, this is perceived as a benefit to users while in fact helping FedEx spend less on answering "Where is my package now?" telephone calls.

The first law of network economics states that the value of a network increases and costs decrease as the number of users increases. (A horizontal externality, no less!)

In their turn, telegrams, telephone calls, faxes and e-mail have demonstrated the truth of this proposition. My first fax machine cost 3,500 quid and only one of my clients had one; today fax software comes free with your modem and virtually every business on the planet has fax access (but Roger couldn't get a new fax machine when he wanted one - see The Dixon's Experience, this issue). The value of the fax network is presumably to be counted in trillions of dollars, yet the opportunity cost for most users is small for entry and minuscule for use. Yet even these economics are beaten hollow by e-mail.

I've focused on the applications rather than the transmission technology for a reason. Infrastructures create their own inertia, and the owners of the infrastructure may be among the last to stumble over the "discontinuities" that lead to a new business model.

Alexander Graham Bell thought the telephone would be used to pipe music into middle class homes.

Telegraph companies, which already owned an extensive copper infrastructure, were profoundly hostile to the new-fangled telephone.

For years, the telephone companies pooh-poohed the idea of data over their circuit switched lines. They used the analogy of a scum of data floating on a sea of voice. Last year, data volumes overtook voice traffic in the USA.

And for the past few years the telcos have been trying to dismiss the ultimate indignity: voice over IP. Where they have had the power to do so, they have banned its use. History repeats itself: the telegraph companies tried the same thing a century ago, but failed to curb that precocious youngster, the telephone.

IP networking can utilize telephone lines, but is not limited to them. The Internet's relationship with the telephone is an accident of history: the US military wanted a resilient communications system that could utilize a public infrastructure damaged by nuclear attack. The telephone companies own a vast smart, circuit-switched infrastructure. The Internet, which utilizes smart packets, does not require a smart, expensive infrastructure.

The telephone industry was weaned on a high cost/high revenue business model. For most of its history, that model has been enforced by monopoly control, allowing telcos the luxury of deciding what services they would offer, when and what they would charge for them.

It is little wonder, then, that when telcos began to look at wireless, they did so in the same context of a high cost/high revenue model.

Wireless can, and should be, cheap. In remote, rural or developing areas, wireless offers a connectivity model beginning around 1.5 megs a second (enough to converge Internet, IP telephony and some broadcast services) and offering an upgrade path towards gigabit networking.

Billions are being invested in wireless, yet the overwhelming majority is directed to narrow band premium services aimed at corporations and affluent executives. Even the basic wireless phone, which now makes public area a misery, still commands a premium price for line time.

Much of the discussion about telcos' strategies for networking focuses on the issue of backwards compatibility. This is the inertia that networks impose. The telcos have most of their assets in wire, and the majority of homes still rely on a twisted pair for access to the telephone/data networks.

But quite apart from the transmission issues, the real question is how many telcos have actually grasped the reality of network economics, much less that of the network economy. Telco executives have learned to mouth the phrases at conferences and in front of investors, but their actions proclaim otherwise.

In e-mail chatter back and forth between us, Roger linked this stuff to another group fighting a rearguard action in the face of network economics. (No, not dear old Novell.) The rich members of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), meeting in Seattle, were clearly doing their best to ensure that the playing field remained sharply tilted in their favour. The poor countries, with spirits up and spirit levels out, fought back this time. Stalemate for now.

Just as the telcos and their primary customers - the large corporations - are hostile to the levelling tendencies of network economics, so too the rich nations seek to organize trade so that high production-cost regimes are protected, while ensuring that the profits to be had from the classic exhortation to "buy cheap, sell dear" continue to reside in the developed economies. The problem with classic liberalism is that it's difficult to take just the bits you like.

The idea of buying cheap and selling dear is, in theory, mitigated by the principle that perfect pricing can be struck by access to perfect information.

The Internet is far removed from the status of "perfect information", but it is a fantastically powerful tool for the exchange of market information on supply and demand, cost and value. As such, its power and potential are of even greater significance for the developing world than the developed. Cheap networks will permit producers in developing regions to participate more directly in the markets for their goods and services creating on a grand scale the disintermediation that is already reshaping whole distribution channels in the West.

A high cost/high revenue network model, however, would effectively disenfranchise over three quarters of the world's population. Classic economics says that will not happen, because substantially lower cost models are available, much as the leading suppliers of today's telecoms infrastructure might like them to go away.

However, telephone markets in the developing world tend to be highly regulated and monopolized. Despite recent liberalization in India and some other regimes, it is difficult to see governments encouraging a mass migration to low cost high-speed networking. Most Third World governments aren't actually terribly keen on the idea of putting sophisticated communications technology into the hands of the people. (Come to think of it, European governments also get positively anal retentive at the thought of not being able to read or listen to their citizens' chatter). Also, telecoms revenue can account for a high proportion of the exchequer's earnings in a small country; taxes would have to go up to replace any loss from that, an electorally unpopular move anywhere.

Be that as it may, history suggests that faster, cheaper communications technologies are always perceived as threatening to both the economic and political status quo. This goes right back to the notion of the Vulgate Bible and the perils implicit in cheap reproduction via movable type; tyrannies tend to license and monitor photocopiers. Despite the efforts of vested interests, the new technologies tend to win out. (It is tempting to say "inevitably", but both China and Japan successfully suppressed new technologies for centuries. Other techniques, such as steam power, were known and understood, but nonetheless languished for centuries.

Roger raises the question of whether any network has ever really got "dumber". It is interesting to consider how much intelligence there was in a shipping network in 1600, say, compared with today, or a railway network in, say, 1900, compared with today - or even the road network in Henry Ford's time compared with today. The 'intelligence' and amount of technology invested in each has gone up as well as that in the devices travelling over them and in the way-stations and termini/ports. Is the Internet really the first "dumbing down" of a network, he wonders. It is tempting to argue that if drivers - or their vehicles - were smarter, the road network could safely be made dumber. Still, the move from circuit switched networks to packet switched networks is, in a sense, a dumbing down of the network, by making the traffic more intelligent and the termini more capable. And, likely Roger is correct that it's a first. Networks should get cheaper as they get more users and greater capability. In this case they also get simpler and dumber.

Let the telcos play with smart expensive networks, just as the railways continued their "do it our way at our price" approach for three quarters of a century after the introduction of motor vehicles. What the rest of us need is fat, dumb networks.

-oOo-

+++The Dixons experience

What follows is the description of what started as a genuine attempt, in mid-November 1999, to shop from the Dixons Group with the aid of the Web. I wanted a multifunction printer/scanner/fax machine and proposed to buy it from PC World, the nearest branch of which is a half-hour's drive away. I knew that the store stayed open late but wasn't sure exactly how late.

First I tried the obvious tactic of entering "www.pcworld.co.uk" into my browser. There was no such site, apparently (and I already knew that "www.pcworld.com" belonged to an American computer magazine).

So I went to the Dixons corporate Web site, since I already had that bookmarked. There I found a link to a PC World page. It was, though, just a store locator.

Well, I could at least get a telephone number, I thought, so I could find out the store's closing time. (I had intended finding a suitable product on the Web, and then calling PC World to ask their price on it before driving out to them.)

Entering the first two digits of my post code in the store locator form, as instructed, produced no response, whether entered in upper or lower case. Wondering if it was a quirk of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, I tried it again, both ways, with two other makes of browser (Netscape and Opera). Still nothing, so instead I clicked on the interactive map on the page.

This produced a list of stores near me, with addresses and telephone numbers. Dialling the number for my nearest store produced a message from the telephone company (BT) saying it didn't recognize that number.

Over I went to BT's online directory service, to discover that the entry on the Dixons site was missing the last digit. (I could have contacted directory enquiries to start with, you might reasonably say, but I was trying to do Web shopping and hadn't at that time realised the obstacles facing me.)

Dialling the correct number got me through to the PC World store. After having to listen twice to a recorded message and then entering another digit, I heard that the store closed at 8 o'clock at night - too early for me to get to that day.

Consoling myself with the thought that I would at least be able to see what Dixons itself had to offer, I went back to the group Web site. Five screens later, I reached the page for the Dixons online shop. Another four clicks further on, having clicked on the icon labeled "multifunction devices", I saw this message on screen: 'SORRY! there are currently no products available in this department.' It had taken me a total of eight clicks to discover that.

By now, I had switched from being a shopper to being an investigator, so I attempted to make the same purchase but directly from the Dixons stores site, rather than the corporate one. This time it took me 'only' six clicks to discover that there was nothing available.

I then used a search engine to check if there really was no Web site for PC World and succeeded in finding one. It is at http://www.pcw-software.co.uk/ . Not the most obvious domain name, I feel, and one that not many people would think of without prompting.

Anyway, off I went to PC World to see if it could supply what I was after. On the home page, there was the same semi-effective store finder, and an invitation to enter the online store. This says "we have the answer - from software to furniture". To be accurate, what it should say is "we have the answer - if it's software or furniture". This is all that consumers can buy from the site. Other than MP3 players, it does not sell them hardware.

Not to be outdone, I then clicked on a link to "Business Direct", a trade-only part of the site. This allowed me in as a guest, while making clear that I would need an account to make any purchases. Four pages later (two of them for me to indicate my agreement to various trading conditions), I arrived at the product locator.

My first move was to enter "multifunction" in the search field. This produced two hits: a modem and a Samsung SF 4500C Multi-functional P.P.E.M., whatever that was. It turned out to be the kind of thing I was looking for, at £259. Success of a sort, therefore, after six clicks and some text entry.

It was only partial success, however. There was no choice of product and, with respect to Samsung, I was not being offered anything from a market leader (such as Canon, Epson or HP). Besides, even if I had wanted to buy, I would first have had to go through the rigmarole of opening an account.

I also tried following the menu of product types shown on the product selector page. This led me down several winding alleys, each time landing me up at a selector page that required me to know in advance the detailed specification of what I wanted. The tail was wagging the dog there, I felt.

Finally, out a sense of duty, I tried two of Dixons' competitors, to see what they could do. It was a duty because, frankly, my dear, by that stage I couldn't give a damn whether I found one of these devices or not.

I admit I was pleasantly surprised. Both Comet (http://www.comet.co.uk) and Tempo (http://www.tempo.co.uk) offered me a wide choice of machines and makes, and for a fraction of the effort I had expended previously. It took just four clicks from Comet's home page to get to a list of possible products. Tempo was even quicker - "multifunction" entered in the search box on the home page, a click on the mouse and there, before my very eyes, were nine products for sale, from HP, Brother and, yes, Samsung.

++Postscript

This account, and the profile above, are not part of a personal vendetta against Dixons. The few times I have shopped at its stores, I have been satisfied. Rather, it is to demonstrate that:

Being good at one kind of selling - and Dixons is very good at its particular kind -doesn't necessarily mean a company 'gets it' so far as the Web is concerned.

Even if a company does twig what the Web is about - and the Freeserve part of Dixons clearly has - not every part of it necessarily does.

Mistakes and inconsistencies that one might be able to get away with in the 'real' world become causes of major frustration and irritation on the Web.

A brand name is worth only so much goodwill on the Net. If Dixons is truly trying to put consumers off buying hardware via the Web, it is playing a dangerous game. I have now been inoculated against attempting ever to buy from it on-line.

In case you might be wondering, as I did, whether I hadn't just chosen a bad day for my attempted purchase, I did the same things again, 28 days later. All that had changed were that the telephone number for PC World at Croydon had been corrected and that entering "http://www.pcworld.co.uk" into one's browser now jumps you to the 'pcw-software' site. All else was the same, including the lack of multifunction printers at Dixons.

So, lesson number five is: if your Web server tells you someone has found a stock-out on a sales page, do something about it. And if your Web server doesn't tell you such things, do something about that, too. On the Web, a month is a lifetime.

There are fifteen shopping days to Christmas.

-oOo-

+++Clicks or mortar

There are several claimants to the title of inventor of the expression "clicks and mortar", describing the combination of online and traditional ways of doing business. Hycel Partners are clear favourites to be originators of the idea of compelling traders to make a choice between the two.

Hycel, of St Louis, Missouri, USA, owns the Saint Louis Galleria. This is a busy and profitable shopping centre in that city, containing 170 shops in about 1.2 million square feet. Many of these shops are branches of well-known chains, such as Sharper Image and Rand McNally. Naturally, many have Web sites, from which some of them trade.

Towards the end of November 1999, in an action that has attracted much attention in America, Hycel's president, Mark Zorensky, attempted to ban the display of their URLs by these shops. Hycel wrote to its tenants, telling them that they cannot display anything in their shops that promotes or encourages sales through the Web.

Zorensky was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying, "If a sale is rung up on the Internet, then it's not rung up in the store." This is undoubtedly true but, by that token, one should also ban selling by mail-order (a huge industry in the USA, dwarfing ecommerce) and cable-television as being destructive of in-store sales.

Could this man, or his director of leasing, the effervescent Marsha P. Fuchs, really be so dim as to believe this will make a difference? Was it a stunt, perhaps? (April Fool's Day is a long way from November.) Or was Hycel trying to make a point to legislators? As one would expect, there were dark mutterings from the shop owners about retaliatory actions. Right Start, which sells educational toys, threatened legal action.

A week later, Hycel had retracted its attempted ban. In a letter to its tenants, Zorensky apparently said: "In our continued effort to make your Galleria store the most productive in your company, we went overboard! . . . We accept the inevitable and wish you a great holiday selling season at the Galleria." Not the most gracious apology one could have hoped for but an apology none the less.

There might have been is more to this one than plain boneheadness but, frankly, we can't yet see what it might have been. Hycel has, after all, a Web site for the centre (http://www.saintlouisgalleria.com), on which can be found the Web sites for many of the shops in it. There is no sign of a prohibition on trading from these sites. It appears that Hycel was happy for e-commerce to be encouraged in its virtual mall, just not its real one.

There is a sharp irony to be found when visiting Hycel's own Web site (http://www.hycel.com). According to that, "As the shopping centre industry moves into the 21st century, owners must continue to adapt and change, moving ever faster to better accommodate the realities of retailing and the lifestyles of today's customers." On its showing so far, rather than adapting and changing, Hycel simply appears to have adopted the posture that legend attributes to the ostrich.

-oOo-

+++The virgin burgeon's a very fine mish(take)

In a press release seen recently, from a PR company called Ketchum : "Although the ASP market is bludgeoning, relatively few companies have announced the specific range of services they will be offering . . ."

Blunt speaking is so rare from PR firms these days.

-oOo-

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