Grainger’s investments into e-commerce 10 to 15 years ago don’t look like large gambles today, but as our lead article by associate editor Jenel Stelton-Holtmeier illustrates, it was in fact a large dollar amount for what the adoption rate was at the time and also the company’s culture. I was publicly skeptical at the time, questioning whether it was bleeding edge rather than leading edge. How smart was I?
As the timeline illustrates, Grainger’s online sales took off with the dot-com era by 1999. It has continued to scale up along with the Internet.
