Another followup story.
March 10, 2000
CyberShop: It Couldn't-a Been a Contender
Is e-retailer CyberShop the product of disastrous management or a portent of Net things to come? Coverage of the company's travails has so far been iterative ? a report here, a wire-service brief there ? and restrained. But this week's New York Observer fired off a full-scale volley and suggested CyberShop is no fluke.
CyberShop started life as a seller of discounted designer apparel, home furnishings and electronics. With its stock slumming at $5 a share, the company announced Feb. 9 that it was switching to the venture-funding business. Then late last month the New York Times reported that while CyberShop's quarterly report, issued on Feb. 1, had bragged of booming revenue from a joint venture and an acquisition, sales had tanked 28 percent ? a point the company had conveniently failed to note, according to a report on Dow Jones News Wires. Days later, shareholders slapped the company with a class-action lawsuit for violating federal securities laws. Not only did CyberShop "belatedly disclose" its quarterly losses and plans to abandon e-retailing, but the omissions allowed its founder to ditch his holdings at artificially inflated prices, the suit alleged.
This week, New York Observer columnist Christopher Byron took a swing at the story. If the Internet bulls despise Alan Greenspan, they must surely hiss at Byron, whose bare-knuckled take on the Net economy can make Greenspan sound like a giddy Silicon Investor poster. Byron expects CyberShop to turn out to be the rule, not the exception among dot-com businesses. "(W)hat the folks at Cybershop did suggests how desperate the situation is now getting for many dot-com companies in the Internet space," he wrote. "You simply cannot make money from consumer retailing on the Web."
thestandard.com
I don't think Tauber and his wife dumping 1.2 million shares at $10 was desperation. Maybe greed, disdain, shallow come to mind.
Jack |
