Petsmart Payroll: Fill & Download for Free

Pets.com fell victim to the e-commerce apocalypse of 2000, an early phase of the dot-com crash of 2000–2001 and the ensuing 2001 U.S. recession. They didn’t do anything horribly wrong, they were just ahead of their time, trying to scale a brand-driven online retail company before many people were shopping online, trying to disrupt a mature major industry, all before the world had fast, cost-effective hardware, software, and service tools that allowed tech companies to scale.It wasn’t the unit cost economics that killed Pet Supplies, Accessories and Products Online and its 5 or so major competitors, it was the high fixed cost of operating an e-commerce site. They needed to scale massively to overcome that, and there just wasn’t enough time or money left during the early days of the recession to support that growth, or enough of a market. To make matters worse, there was nothing protectable about Pet Supplies, Accessories and Products Online, no moat, just a short domain name and a memorable if annoying sockpuppet.You have to imagine the distant world of 1998–2000. Brick and mortar pet stores were doing just fine, a multi billion dollar business, and there was no major problem that needed a new solution. Only a couple hundred million people were online, and by 2000 around 1% of all retail was e-commerce, compared to 10% today.Image: in a curious twist of fate, Amazon Prime members can get free 2-day shipping for a Pets.Com Sock Puppet, and Amazon actually makes a profit off the transaction.Most people had heard since 1996 or 1997 that the Internet was the next big thing but few were online yet, even fewer had fast connections that could display a fancy website, and yet fewer trusted that they could safely send their credit card number over a dial-up phone line and actually have a product show up at their door eventually. On the consumer side, Paypal did not yet exist and things we all depend on like security, encryption, privacy, digital wallets, online credit card statements, order history and tracking, were either nonexistent or in rudimentary form. Search was pretty rudimentary, much less metadata and paid search - if you typed “dog shampoo” into your browser you were more likely to see a sophomoric poem or something pornographic than a relevant list of online retailers. Most brand discoveries were made by advertising, word of mouth, directory listings, and web surfing “site of the day” sites.So fine, it was a small market of early adopters. You can still make a niche business, right?Not in 1998. To start anything online back then took millions and millions of dollars of infrastructure. Cloud computing was not commercially available at scale so you needed a physical server farm to serve your website — actually, several, distributed to different geographic locations. You could not get free development environments, or even good paid ones. The engineers had to set up and maintain all their own tools. If they ran into a mental block there was no Stack Exchange to answer their question (or reddit, user groups, or just google it) they had to sleep on it. It gets worse. There was no B2B SaaS to speak of, so everything from the phone system to the accounting system to load balancing, payroll, word processing, all had to be bought, made, and physically installed on floppy discs and CD-Roms, there was no downloading!. Everything else in business technology was slow, clunky, a DIY project, or just not available.So one by one at first, and then in a big resounding thud, nearly all of the e commerce sites died an inglorious death and the whole online economy imploded into a hole from which only a few emerged. But boy, did they, companies like Paypal, google, eBay and Amazon.In the online pet world it was a legacy brick and mortar company, Petsmart, that came out on top, at least initially. Petsmart bought the domain and most of the assets of pets.com, and is doing just fine as of 2019, taken private by a private equity firm for about $8 billion.Disclaimer, I am a veteran of the pet food wars of the late 90s, having been lawyer to some early online pet stores. I even have an original Pet Supplies, Accessories and Products Online promotional tee shirt and talking sock puppet somewhere in the basement. Plus, I own the historic issue of Mad Magazine, below (not my image).(Image: of all of the fads of 2000, it’s funny that Pokemon is even bigger today)