The Netty Professor

Marketing professor Bruce Weinberg's study of the online retail experience became something much bigger: a personal obsession with shopping on the Web. Does his nonstop online shopping tell us that e-commerce will eventually consume us all?

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Is Bruce Weinberg's obsession with on-line shopping a warning that E-commerce will consume us all?

It's just after 8 p.m. on a Tuesday evening, and Bruce D. Weinberg has stationed himself inside the nerve center of his suburban Boston home. Seated among stacks of new-economy publications and a Macintosh computer carcass -- his two-year-old son, Sam, uses the central processing unit as a step stool so he can see his dad's computer screen -- Weinberg stares into his monitor with enough intensity to rival the two bare lightbulbs burning overhead. At this particular moment, as at most moments, he's deftly clicking around the virtual aisles of yet another E-retail outpost. Finding what he wants at 20% less than what he expected to spend, he says, "Wow, are they going after market share." Suspicious, he freezes the window for safekeeping but keeps searching just to make sure there's no better deal anywhere else. Fortunately, he's got a cable connection with a maw wide enough to match his hunger for hunting. And parked atop his desk, at roughly the dimensions of a Yugo, is a printer that spits out 17 pages a minute. "Time is at a premium for me," says Weinberg, petting the machine.

Sure it is. Weinberg's busy. An associate professor of marketing and E-commerce at Bentley College, just outside Boston, he's also got three small children. But more significantly, he's always got shopping to do. It's not that Weinberg, 41, is the ultimate conspicuous consumer, although he does have his buying sprees. He's self-conscious enough to issue a warning before unlocking a bunker in his basement. "I'll show you the collection, and you can tell me if I'm off the deep end," he suggests, indicating that he already knows the answer. The door swings open to reveal "400, at least" Batman action figures. "Bruce delves into things very enthusiastically," says his wife, Amy Ebersole.

But what separates Weinberg from the mall-medicated masses isn't how much stuff he buys or how hard he strives to spend as little as possible on it. His buying consumes him because he insists on shopping solely by computer. That means everything: an instantly gratifying gallon of milk, a set of tires, a pair of cuffed khakis, a package of calculator batteries. He's purchased ruby earrings, foot-cushion inserts, film, Creole seasoning, a "good-quality" spatula, a Tom Peters book, and a toy replica of George Harrison, the quiet Beatle. In short, he's bought (and, in the case of the khakis that were too long, returned) everything on-line that he would normally buy in what he now calls the "dirt" world. And he's done so since mid-September 1999, when he set out to try it for three months, later extending the project's duration to a year. Not that he's been out to perform a survivalist stunt. "If I'm in a mean mood, I'll just mention DotComGuy to him. 'That's not research,' he'll say, 'that's a sham,' " says Jonathan Hibbard, Weinberg's "manager" on the project and an assistant professor of marketing at Boston University's Graduate School of Management, where the project originated. DotComGuy is the bogeyman of Internet obsessives, a Dallas-based fellow who, on January 1, reduced his life to a yearlong Webcast. Weinberg, on the other hand, considers himself a scientist on a mission.

Bruce Weinberg buys everything on-line: milk, ruby earrings, footpads -- even a toy replica of George Harrison.

That mission first took shape a couple of years ago, when Weinberg, having spent eight years as assistant professor of marketing and E-commerce, lost his battle for tenure at Boston University's B-school. Afterward, he felt "exposed." He decided that the mathematical forecasting he'd been doing was "not in my soul. I liked it, but I didn't love it."

What he feels for E-commerce is much different, though he's not prepared to label his emotions. "I didn't expect this," says Weinberg, leaning back in his chair, displaying his Batman T-shirt at full wingspan. "I'm feeling things that I was definitely not expecting to feel." But the goals have been suitably scholarly: to generate hypotheses about how the consumer decision-making process, as marketers have traditionally understood it, differs in an on-line environment.

"In E-commerce, a consumer is still a consumer. However, the language is different," he explains. "It's like being dropped in a foreign country where they have a lot of the same things -- department stores, food, trains -- but the way they go about meeting those requirements is different." How can on-line sellers create the right type of buying experience for consumers? How can buyers prepare themselves for a satisfying foray?

"This is a great time to get engaged and to try to understand all of this," says Weinberg. "If I can find some principles here -- don't do it this way, do it that way -- then it's saving everybody some aggravation."

Typically, such a study would involve surveying consumers. But Weinberg, having zeroed in on a phenomenon he describes as "fast-changing, uncharted, and 'Wild West,' " has chosen a "highly qualitative" methodology. He's studying himself. For now, anyway. "If we wanted to do a study asking, 'What do self-consciously sophisticated marketing people think of shopping on the Internet?' then we could start with him," says Sidney J. Levy, head of the marketing department at the Eller College of Business and Public Administration at the University of Arizona. "He's typical of who he's typical of. And that's OK as a way to start thinking about anything."

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