You watched dotcoms take a long, icy bath in 2000, and as a result, you have cold feet. Who wants to work 100-hour weeks only to see half of your coworkers get laid off as your stock options sink into a virtual grave?

But don't give up the ship; there's still hope for your Internet career. Consider signing on with the online crew of a click-and-brick company, a firm that marries Old Economy stability with the New Economy's growth potential.

"This year is shaping up to be a pretty healthy year" for traditional retailers' online counterparts, says Seema Williams, an analyst with Forrester Research, Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts. When a traditional company buys out a failed dotcom, it is usually more interested in PCs than people. "Still, Click-and-brick companies can provide solid opportunities for folks bailing out of dotcoms," says Williams.

What Makes BlueLight Special?

In early 2000, Emily Kanter was looking to take her project-management skills online. "All my friends were going to any dotcoms they could get into," she says. "But there were already questions about Net pure plays... I asked myself, 'Is there any way to avoid some of the risk?'" Kanter decided to take the middle road, signing on in February with BlueLight.com, LLC of San Francisco, Kmart Corp.'s online partner.

As this discount retailer's executive program manager, Kanter works with project managers to troubleshoot a wide variety of issues to keep the trains running. Kanter says BlueLight has a double-edged advantage in its space: the agility of a startup company combined with the buying power of a retail behemoth.

Kanter is glad that Kmart has BlueLight on a relatively long leash. "We don't deal with them at all, day-to-day," she says. Still, a lot of resources are spent preparing for board meetings, and Kmart is accustomed to taking much more time to complete projects than BlueLight does, says Kanter.

Analyst Williams is less sanguine about the relationship between brick-bound retail giants and their click-based offspring. "You are still absolutely mired in the big company's way of doing things," she says.

But for Kanter, the security of Kmart's backing is worth the price of allegiance to a bureaucratic corporation. Her bottom line: "We don't have to worry about getting our paychecks."

A New Spin on an Old-Line Business

When Cindy Smith accepted a position at CopiersNow Inc. in August 2000, she was following a career philosophy similar to Kanter's. "I don't think I would have gone to work for a pure-play dotcom," says Smith, director of marketing for the Englewood, Colorado, purveyor of office equipment and service.

Smith liked CopiersNow's hybrid value proposition. It offers customers a great selection and lower prices on copies by showcasing merchandise online and in select, centralized stores called product centers. "The business model is to cut administrative costs, which are eating traditional suppliers alive," she says. The company hopes to expand from its current two physical locations to 50 in the next three years.

CopiersNow also won Smith over with its talent mix. The founding executives are veterans of the office equipment business, and many of the technology folks are much younger Internet native speakers. "I'm interviewing people who have been at three failed dotcoms," notes Smith.

Still, as a startup that just secured its second round of financing, CopiersNow doesn't offer the security of a BlueLight.com, Williams-Sonoma.com or Gateway.

Both Smith and Kanter feel their cash compensation is superior to that of peers in the offline world. They also earn stock options in their privately held firms, although it's questionable whether they will ever be convertible to the kind of money you can spend in a brick-and-mortar store. But Smith and Kanter do have peace of mind, knowing that even if their options go up in smoke, their jobs probably won't.