The Internet has radically changed the way consumers buy books and airline tickets, trade stock and learn news.
But plenty of people have found other uses: purchasing airline tickets, checking stock prices and sending e-mail, sometimes rather personal in nature: "Please sell all the materials," read one from Nigeria to the apparently displeased recipient.
Agents say that buying a home is a far more complicated transaction than buying airline tickets or stocks.
The problem with our rail network isn't the rolling stock, ticket pricing structures or track.
These days consumers are inclined to seek special deals and wait for sales before they buy large ticket items or stock up on small items.
Those intermediary services facilitate the sale of goods (actually delivering the goods in the case of information), the provision of services such as banking, ticket reservations, and stock market transactions, and the delivery of remote education and entertainment.
Coming soon to many Web-enabled A.T.M.'s will be additional services like ticket purchasing, personalized stock quotes, sports scores, maps, directions, bill payment and the ability to call up an image of a canceled check from your account.
A bike is the ultimate big-ticket consumer discretionary stock; you can always postpone buying a Hog.
We also include three "large ticket" consumer durable stocks that will see increased demand with lowered rates: Whirlpool, La-Z-Boy and Furniture Brands International.
Sure, fans might still want hard stock tickets for special events like the Super Bowl, but in his view, by-and-large they're going to disappear.
Groetzinger acknowledged that some people still think of a classic, hard-stock ticket and think, "That's what a ticket looks like," but in his view, that's just nostalgia.
