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.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)