Contents ...
Disappearing Warehouses and Fake Fleets, Huh?

PikeNet 2000 / Apr 5-7, 2000 / San Francisco

Is that Warehouse Full? ... Did you read the front-page WSJ article about FedEx reinventing itself (Nov 4)? It described how FedEx will coordinate all Cisco's shipments direct from manufacturer to customer. "Gradually, Cisco's need for warehouses is supposed to disappear as more orders are merged in transit." Huh? ... Here's FedEx's plan: "Merge Cisco's orders in transit. As many as a hundred different boxes destined for a single customer would be shipped independently as soon as they are manufactured--and they would all arrive at a customer's door within hours of each other. ... never spending a moment in a central warehouse." Oh, really.

Now contrast this with the following story a week later (Nov 11) in the WSJ. Turns out that some dot-com firms want to appear like brick-and-mortar companies -- not virtual companies. For example, BigStar Entertainment, which sells video tapes and DVDs online, has paid a New York trucking company to plaster the BigStar name on 23 local delivery trucks so that it appears that they are carrying BigStar products (which are actually delivered by UPS). In fact, the trucks are probably carrying "pizza boxes or office equipment." This promotion has been so successful that BigStar will expand its fake fleet to 203 trucks in Dallas, San Francisco and Los Angeles. All to "create a sense of permanence," according to the company.

Hey, why not fake warehouses? What could be better sign of permanence than plastering a dot-com name on a concrete warehouse? It doesn't matter what's inside -- or if anything's inside. Maybe it could be an empty Cisco warehouse. And all those FedEx trucks delivering Cisco products? Maybe they could be decorated with dot-com logos, too. ... What do you think? Send e-mail to me . (Full disclosure: I don't actually believe that e-commerce will eliminate the demand for distribution facilities.)

PikeNet 2000 Hot Topic: "Click-and-Mortar Strategies: the Impact of E-Commerce on Commercial Properties," a roundtable discussion with Hamid Moghadam, AMB; Charlie Graves, General Growth Properties; and Larry Geisel, Organic, Inc. ... PikeNet 2000, Apr 5-7, 2000, in San Francisco. Click the link at the top of the home page or www.pikenet.com/pikenet2000. ... Meet the players!

--Peter