Grant’s Flowers, however, was more of a typical business. Larry Grant wasn’t a writer. And his work was not as network-related as that of Resnick and Cook; unlike the latter, he hadn’t evolved into a net.personality on some key mailing lists. Instead the word was that Larry Grant just paid his $28 a month to an electronic mall—a collection of stores that shared a common subarea of the Net—and sat back and watched his fax machine spew out orders. Grant might not be Davy Crockett in terms of action, but certainly in terms of fame he was coming along. He had appeared as a success story, after all, on the front page of the _New York Times_ business section. As I wended my way through the Net to Grant’s Flowers, I passed through an area called Branch Mall. A logo with a tree branch greeted me. I saw listings for enterprises ranging from cosmetic sellers to H & H Logging and Timber Company. Under “Flowers, Gifts, Foods,” I didn’t see just Grant’s listing. I saw White Dove Flower and Gift Shop, Flowers on Lexington, Exotic Flowers of Hawaii, Bonsai Boy of New York, and half a dozen others. Bob Lilienfeld was skeptical about cybermalls, and right now I could see why. With all this competition, could Grant’s make money off the Internet? Lilienfeld had reminded me that traditional malls and the cyber variety were different, and I understood. If I wanted to shop for books, I could brave traffic to reach Springfield Mall, a large collection of shops maybe ten miles from me in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Springfield would be worth the drive. I could visit four stores right within a five-minute walk of each other—Brentano’s, B. Dalton, Walden, and Crown. The Net, however, was also different. I didn’t have to drive anywhere. I could just use a powerful search engine such as Lycos, key in “bookstore,” and watch name after name pop up on my screen. Lycos demanded just a little technical savvy. But easier alternatives would come along. As if that weren’t enough, Netfolks put together lists of activities on the Internet, and often they included commercial categories. I’d found White Rabbit not through advertising but through the Yahoo list out of Stanford University, on the other side of North America. Distance just didn’t matter. So could the shopping mall metaphor truly work out to the benefit of merchants such as Larry Grant?