“Can America’s Distribution Center make a profit on the
Internet?”
That was the question posed in a Flyer cover story on this
date 10 years ago.
The difficulty of answering that question is apparent in the opening
paragraphs of the story, which touted a hot new company called EveryCD.com as “the biggest music store in
Memphis.” The business sold compact discs from a catalog of 350,000
titles.
The iPod was a few years away, needless to say.
Memphis enjoyed a business boom as companies such as Toys ‘R’ Us,
Nike, Planet Rx, and Williams-Sonoma built or occupied warehouses in
Memphis to serve their online businesses.
An expert quoted in the article predicted that the distribution of
physical goods would drive local employment to ever higher heights for
years, thanks to the online economy. And a would-be entrepreneur cited
“the unexploited supply of tech workers in the area who can be hired at
a fraction of the salary they would demand in high-tech centers such as
New York or California.”
The tech revolution left Memphis somewhat short of Silicon Valley.
Warehouses proved easier to build than to turn into long-term
businesses. Companies got millions of dollars in tax incentives for
promised jobs that never came. And the blight on roads such as Shelby
Drive, Holmes, and Lamar bears witness to that.
As the article noted, talk was cheap on the eve of the new
millennium.
“In May, Amazon.com, the nation’s
number-one online book retailer, scuttled plans at the last minute to
locate a major distibution center here that would have employed
hundreds.”
It wasn’t all hype, of course. Nike and other companies had staying
power, and the infrastructure of FedEx and Memphis International
Airport drives the local economy to this day and will, sooner or later,
lead Memphis out of the recession.
As for Planet Rx, we can’t for the life of us remember what all the
fuss was about.