Article: Selling time; Americans know how to cash in on an event, and the year 2000 provides a once-in-a-dozen-lifetimes opportunity to market, party, manufacture, party, promote, party, and sell, sell, sell the great rollover of history's odometer.(NEWS)

Some societies commemorate historic events by building monuments. American culture turns them into crazes and commercial franchises.

The dawn of the nuclear age saw an explosion of "atomic" foods, films and fashions. The Bicentennial was an outpouring of red-white-and-blue opportunism, and Christmas is celebrated at the checkout line as much as in church. Now comes the marketing opportunity of a hundred lifetimes: the millennium.

Across the country, marketing teams already are mobilizing to seize the day.

Some power plays have been unabashedly brazen. The Millennium Society, a private organization based in Washington, D.C., made a bid to ...

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