一. Shopping Around the Web網(wǎng)上購物
1. A Saturday afternoon in mid-December: not a good time to be hanging around San Francisco's Union Square, the city's premier shopping district. Hundreds of people laden with purchases battle along the pavements, search despairingly for scarce taxis or struggle to get through Macy's doors. It is enough to put anybody off shopping for life. 1. 在十二月中旬的周六下午,去舊金山的主要商業(yè)區(qū)聯(lián)合廣場逛街可不是件輕松的事。成百上千的人帶著大大小小的購物袋擁擠在人行道上,有的在拼命地尋找著出租車,有的在盡力地擠出莫西商場的門口。這種經(jīng)歷足以讓所有人從此對購物望而卻步。
2. But wait: surely Christmas shopping in l999 was different After all, this is close to Silicon Valley, the center of the Internet revolution and the new economy, the land of the tieless billionaires who bought all their presents online at midnight the day after Thanksgiving. Yet the crowds in Union Square last December were as bad as ever. They seemed oblivious of a large billboard advertisement above their heads for one of the Bay Area's many dot.coms, which flashed the message: "Say Goodbye to the Mall." And they paid no attention to the advertisement on many of their shopping bags that pointed a way out of their predicament: "Online Shopping. No Experience Needed." 2.但是且慢,1999年的圣誕購物應(yīng)該有所不同吧?畢竟靠近網(wǎng)絡(luò)革命和新經(jīng)濟(jì)的中心棗硅谷。在這里那些不戴領(lǐng)帶的百萬富翁們早在感恩節(jié)第二天的午夜就把禮物買好了。然而去年的聯(lián)合廣場依舊是人潮如涌。他們似乎根本就看不見頭頂上一家海灣地區(qū)的網(wǎng)絡(luò)公司所做的大幅廣告,上面閃爍著“對商場說再見吧”的字樣。許多購物袋上印著的“在線購物,勿須經(jīng)驗”的廣告給人們指明了擺脫購物困擾的途徑,但他們也熟視無睹。