A sock puppet with a microphone was the most famous thing about Pets.com, and it outlived the company. The San Francisco online pet store went public in February 2000 at $11 a share, weeks before the dot-com peak. The company had been formed only a year earlier. In its first eleven months it booked $5.8 million in sales and lost $61.8 million. Its largest shareholder was Amazon.com.

Heavy Bags, Thin Margins

Pets.com bet that pet owners would rather click than haul. It sold food, toys, litter and supplies online and shipped them to the door. The trouble sat inside the boxes. Pet food is heavy, cheap and costly to ship, so each order earned little or lost money. The company spent big on advertising to build its brand around the sock puppet, and it leaned on Amazon.com and GO.com to send it shoppers.

Nine Months on Nasdaq

Pets.com priced its IPO at $11 a share in February 2000 and traded on Nasdaq as IPET. That spring investors turned on web stores that lost money on every sale, and the stock sank with them. In November 2000 the company said it would wind down. It laid off most of its staff and sold its assets, the sock puppet included. The shell company, renamed IPET Holdings, deregistered its stock in 2005.

Cover: The Dancing Dog, Cornelis Dusart. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a performing dog (the sock puppet).