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Target sets sites on Internet customers
Target Stores and AOL have reinforced their alliance by issuing a co-branded CD-ROM of the online service that gives customers 500 hours of free Web access a month and, for a year, a 10% discount on merchandise purchased from target.com. The venture is designed to drive AOL users to Target, via direct links, and to attract Target customers to AOL by distributing the CDs at the discounter’s 900 U.S. stores.

War of independents
The future looked dire for independent bookstores with the growth of chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble during the 1990s, and about half of them went out of business. But now they are using the Internet to fight back. By sharing Internet database and delivery systems such as BookSite.com, independent booksellers can vastly increase their title lists and offer books, new and out-of-print, at prices competitive with giants like Amazon. Other databases used by small bookstores include bibliofind.com and abe.com. “I think the future is very, very bright for independents,” Dick Harte, the owner of a small bookstore in Delaware, Ohio, and creator of BookSite, told The Wall Street Journal recently.

Telly tubbies
Until 15 years ago you couldn’t get pizza delivered in Britain, let alone any other food. Today, Domino’s is selling £50,000 ($74,500) worth of pizza a week there via interactive television and the Internet alone, representing 3% of its total business in the United Kingdom. Within 10 years the company will be selling one-third of its pizzas through those mediums, it predicts. Interactive television sales, in which consumers order pizza with a remote control, are three times higher than Internet sales. Domino’s delivered its first British pizza in 1985, and began selling via interactive television and the Internet during the fall and Christmas of 1999, respectively. But the company has some catching up to do in the United States: Apart from a test with interactive TV in San Francisco and a couple of scattered locations that offer online ordering, pizza has to be obtained the old-fashioned way, said Holly Ryan, a Domino’s spokeswoman.

E-staff for Xmas
Denver-based gotajob.com says it has the solution for retailers struggling with the age-old problem of attracting temporary retail staff: The online company, which specializes in temporary employment positions, says more than half a million job seekers had submitted applications by July, and that in excess of 500 national franchise groups and retail chains had posted openings with gotajob. Placing an ad on an Internet site costs about 5% as much as the cost of a classified ad in a major newspaper for 30 days, and can reach a lot more people, according to a recent article in The New York Times.