Memo

By Megan Rutherford; Valerie Marchant

MORTGAGES? NAH...

For years experts have predicted that one of the products that would naturally gravitate to the Internet would be home mortgages. Unlike various other kinds of merchandise, they don't need to be tried on, smelled, tasted or prodded to determine how good they are or whether they fit. That is turning out not to be the case...so far. Americans still seem reluctant to double-click themselves into six-figure financial commitments. Though prospective borrowers are happy enough to do their research by computer, just 21% of folks polled for the 1999 Fannie Mae National Housing Survey said they would definitely or probably try financing a new home over the Internet. That's an increase of only 1 percentage point over three years ago. This year, Forrester Research projects, the Internet will account for only 1.5%, or $19 billion, of new mortgage loans. --Megan Rutherford

...BUT DESIGNER LABELS? YES!

Shopping for designer clothing at bargain rates usually requires long drives to far-off malls and outlets or sorting through messy racks and bins at department stores. Now there's Bluefly. Not even a year old, Bluefly.com is already a leading Internet retailer, and it specializes in the $27 billion-a-year discounted-designer-clothing market. In the past three months, more than 5 million bargain hunters looking for easier ways to shop 24/7 have visited the site, many attracted by the company's ads in magazines like Vogue and GQ or prompted by links from Women.com AOL and other popular Net portals. Bluefly's CEO, Ken Seiff, increased gross sales 140% in the past quarter to $1.1 million and attracted a $10 million investment from Soros Private Equity Partners. Without waiting for a profit, he has used the instant feedback that the Internet provides to renovate his virtual store, exploding his product images to 400% of what they were at the original website. Customers are now able to examine details, textures and colors on their computer screen before choosing and paying for their Nicole Miller dresses and Giorgio Armani shirts--all in less time that it took to park the car at the mall. --Valerie Marchant

THE TEMPORARY: FEW AND SATISFIED

Conventional wisdom is that the lean, mean but powerful U.S. economy owes its strength to the armies of temporary employees that make up a larger and larger percentage of the work force. But this time conventional wisdom is wrong, according to economist Max Lyons of the Employment Policy Foundation, a Washington-based research and education group. Temps make up only between 1% and 2% of the total employed, Lyons argues in a recent study, and most of them do not temp for long; 75% of those who work temporarily do so for no more than a year. Lyons reveals, too, that long assignments are rare: only 12% of temps work on one assignment for more than two years, a situation that has not changed much in the past 15 years. That said, temps who work on long-term assignments tend to appreciate the flexibility their jobs offer and to be more satisfied than those in short-term positions; and 64% of temps with more than two years' tenure get health-care insurance from their employers, about the same percentage as those with permanent jobs. --VM