Commerce Ventures Blamed by FoodUSA.com
by March 5, 2001 12:00 am 97 views
Another prominent business-to-business online food exchange failed recently in FoodUSA.com of Madison, Wis., which handled trades of meat and poultry. Rod Heller, the startup’s founder and chairman, recently told the Associated Press that the business closed after a plan to sell out went south.
Heller said that the expected launch of provisionx.com by Commerce Ventures “froze the market,” and caused his business to fail. Tyson Foods declined comment.
Heller now plans to launch B2B Clearing Corp., a financial e-clearinghouse.
The food industry is not the only area where dot-com cutbacks have hit:
On Feb. 28, Walmart.com of Brisbane, Calif., laid off 24 workers, which is 10 percent of its work force. The firm’s CEO, Jeanne Jackson, told the AP that Walmart.com is adding designers and engineers to make its site more robust.
Online clearinghouse Buy.com cut 125 jobs on Feb. 26, or about 55 percent of its staff. It was the second time in less than a month that it fired personnel.
Walt Disney Internet Group in February laid off 135 more people, with the deepest cuts coming at ABCNews.com and ABC.com. Previously, 400 similar Disney jobs were already lost because its portal Go.com failed. That’s a 25 percent total reduction of Disney’s Internet workforce, from 2,100 to 1,500, this year.
The employment research firm of Challenger, Gray & Christmas estimates that nearly 11,700 people lost Internet jobs nationwide in February. That includes 2,874 e-tail jobs. The total of Internet layoffs climbed to 24,477 for the year.