Wild talk _about_ Grant notwithstanding, he wasn’t a braggart—simply a proud family entrepreneur. I learned that Grant’s Flowers was actually part of a mini local conglomerate. “We’ve been here since 1947,” he said, “and my folks started farming and selling produce by the side of the road off a kitchen table. We’re now a million-dollar business and have many facets. We have a flower and gift shop, and the front of the building is beer and foods. We farm 131 acres.” Two brothers were in the business, and so was his eighty-year-old mother. “She runs the flower and gift section, and I run the rest of the retail sales and my brothers do all the growing and production. We’ve got two acres of greenhouses growing plants for spring sale or gardeners. It’s a very diversified operation.” Grant clearly wasn’t making a living off the Internet alone, despite a good start. “We got online in February just before Valentine’s Day and we received forty orders that week. In the first ten days we had over 2,900 look in on our electronic storefront. Then it dropped to one or two orders a day, and then we got to Mother’s Day and had a high of forty in one day. Currently we’ve increased from one or two to six, in that range.” When I asked what his current Net-related gross would be per year, he roughly estimated it at perhaps $15,000 or $20,000. That was enough to make the Web area well worth his time, but this was hardly a tale of instant riches. I remembered a magazine ad—for would-be providers of Internet services—that showed a mustached man beside a Rolls or Mercedes. Larry Grant was a Web merchant, not someone hooking people up with the Net. But I wished that the get-rich-quickers of all stripes could see Larry Grant as a realistic example of the Net’s promise. The gold might come eventually, and it was worthwhile to chase after it by going online, but, for most people, the big money wasn’t there yet. What’s more, costs for newer customers of Branch Mall were higher. Grant had been the first merchant there and enjoyed a break. Now Branch was charging thousands a year for Web areas that included elaborate programming and creative work.[2.6]