Referring to Wal-Mart's upcoming redesign of its Web site, one analyst said it will give retailing a "jolt" and another said it will "change Internet retailing." Evie Black Dykem, of Forrester Research, Inc., said, "It will be the shot heard round the retail world." When the world's largest retailer stakes its claim on the Internet, many predict that life will never again be the same. "The power to navigate the world at the click of a mouse is a force that is transforming our lives like none before," wrote the editors of Business Week. A few paragraphs later, they added, "Anyone with a computer is a citizen of the world-and a richer world at that."

While driving down Boston’s Massachusetts Avenue one Saturday afternoon, it dawned on me that every bus stop shelter along this popular main artery sported advertising signage for Apple’s iPad 2. Assuming that many bus riders were not target customers for a product selling between $500 and nearly $900, the two of us in the car thought that spending advertising dollars at bus stops seemed like a waste of money.

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