Cuc's Plan: Point, Click And Spend

It's betting the online mall's time has arrived

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By Susan Jackson

September 15, 1997 at 4:00 AM UTC

This article is for subscribers only.

When Anton Nazaruk of Brick Town, N.J., was pricing Jeep Cherokees in August, he called local dealers and then he E-mailed two Internet auto sites. The next morning, he got a reply from one, AutoVantage, which suggested he drive 50 miles to McCafferty Ford in Langhorne, Pa. Nazaruk did and ended up paying $1,000 less than the local best offer. As for the other Web site, "I still haven't heard from them," says the retired firefighter.

Nazaruk is the kind of customer who could turn a 24-year-old dream into reality for Walter A. Forbes. Since 1973, the founder of Comp-U-Card has envisioned a day when shoppers would buy everything from Cuisinarts to couches via their home computers. But for years, this seemed like little more than a harebrained notion out of The Jetsons. So Forbes built CUC International Inc. into two dozen mail-order shopping, travel, auto, entertainment, and financial-services clubs, with some 68 million members and 1996 revenues of $2.4 billion.