The game's afoot

(Upstart) Back in 1988, Clint Eastwood made what looks likely to be the last of his Dirty Harry movies; titled “The Dead Pool,” it focused on a macabre parlor game in which players make up lists of celebrities they believe will die before the year ends. The player with the most correct guesses wins. It’s not a stretch to imagine transposing the rules of the game to the e-tailing landscape, and since fantasy football season is now over, I’ve got nothing but free time anyway, so with a new year on the horizon, let’s do it—The Dot-Com Dead Pool.

Right now, the Bob Hope of dot-coms appears to be eToys—last week the company’s stock plummeted to about 20 cents a share after reports that holiday sales would come up far short of expectations. Although eToys has tapped The Goldman Sachs Group to explore "strategic alternatives" like a sale or merger, the prognosis is not good; the same goes for Buy.com and Egghead.com, both of which are on track to run out of money sometime next year. Drugstore.com and PlanetRx.com have failed to take the old adage “Physician, heal thyself” to heart as well. But predicting the imminent demise of eToys is like shooting fish in a barrel—in the Dead Pool, fortune favors the bold, and to win, you’ve got to go for the dark horse.

So here’s my pick: Amazon. I don’t actually believe that Jeff Bezos will finally give up the ghost in 2001—the e-tailer reportedly increased holiday sales 55% over last year’s totals—but still Amazon stock took a beating last week, tumbling to about $15 per share in the face of concerns that sales targets will not be met. The odds on Amazon’s demise are long, to be sure, but at the same time, would you care to wager on the company’s continued survival? As online commerce grows, it’s not the pure-play Internet sites that are thriving, but the online presences of brick-and-mortar standbys like BestBuy.com and Kmart's BlueLight.com. And yes, Amazon is still the season’s number one retail site according to consumer traffic, but number three is eToys—draw your own conclusion.

Pets.com, Furniture.com, Garden.com, Living.com, MotherNature.com, Toysmart.com—the list of 2000’s casualties is long, and for many of the survivors, the question is not if they’ll bite the dust, but when. Make your list, ante up and sit back, but keep one thing in mind: Winning the Dead Pool is a Pyrrhic victory—at the rate the ship is sinking, there might not be any e-tailers left to target come 2002, and that’ll be no fun for anyone.

Senior Editor Jason Ankeny spent 42 bucks to get Steve McNair as his fantasy football quarterback this past season, so take everything he says with a grain of salt. E-mail your NFL playoff predictions to jason_ankeny@intertec.com.