when did usa become a mail order society

sorry i didn't know which forum to post this. i recently went to homedepot to get a water faucet most of them you had to wait 4 days to pick up i was shocked. i went to walmart when my girl first got pregnant and she picked out her crib she wanted i was told that it was on backorder along with most of the other expensive cribs. i went back every week for 5 months before they had it in stock . i used to work in a department store we used to have multiple copies of all our cribs in stockroom all
the time because we could be garranted to sell them. i went 3 years ago to by a camera at walmart it was a 5 megapixel hp camera my walmart store said they were out but i could go online and get it in a couple of days true but it would have cost me 100 dollars more it took me 2 months to finnally find it. my company makes faucets it practices something called lean manurfacturing i think might be part of problem. the other is our apathy. as americans we just let things slide.
we just say well thats the way things are there isan't nothing you can do about it.
why did we get this way. i remeber when you needed a faucet or tool you just went to hardware store and picked it up. next you will go into macdonalds and be told you got to wait 4 days for a bigmac it takes four days to kill and process cow

Originally posted by timbradwell
the other is our apathy. as americans we just let things slide.

Don't lose heart

I'm less worried, personally, about the issue of 5M pixel camera availability, than of the myriad of other problems which we are facing. You can still get the camera you want from a different store (vote with you feet) and probably pay more, but get it.

Mail order has a long history in the States. I saw it on history channel: back in 19th century, you could order a lot of stuff from Sears and Roebuck catalogue. For example, a syringe in a package that also included two doses of morphine. Amazing.

Could not agree more. I hate it too when I go to the store and they tell me they are gonna order it. I can order it myself directly from the manufacturer/reseller thank you very much. When I drive to the store, I expect to drive back home WITH my purchase.

One needs to think of the changes to the supply chain in the last 20 years or so. We not have Just-In-Time (JIT) manufacturing where only a limited supply of product is produced and stored before shipping it, unlike the old warehouses of product that stored 10,000 widgets when the company only sold 100 a month.

The stores buying the widgets don't want to get stuck with older products on their shelves that they may have to discount before they can sell, so they order in lesser quantities and distribute it amongst more stores to lower the risk.

This also frees up huge amounts of money in warehousing and transportation costs so the company can put more into R&D or expansion.

If there is a need to ship something from the warehouse, it can be done in a day to three days usually, so the company doesn't see a big deal in it.

My meds, if the pharmacy doesn't have them in stock, are shipped one day and received the next when I need them filled.

Business is trying to cut corners wherever they can. The thing that I don't like is that I can buy some products online from a companies website cheaper than I can buy it in their store. This happened to me with an electronics store for a portable DVD player for my son. I was $40 cheaper online on their website, but I would have had to wait 4 days to receive it.

JDub

yes i understand what you guys are saying and i could understand about items
not in stock if i was living in the boon docks but my town has a population approaching 200,000 thousand. yet simple everyday things are hard to come by.
but back in the day things were so much easier. that lean inventory we are talking about hurt my city when hurricane floyd hit my state my town is surronded on 3 sides by rivers that cut off us 70 and us highway 17 for almost 2 weeks. in a day or so of the event most grocery stores emptied everything we no way to restock.
luckily walmart can thru because they were able to ship goods from port of wilimington to port of morehead city which was on part of highway 70 still open.

Dont know about you guys, but the only time I go shopping is when my GF wants new shoes. I almost always buy stuff online. I am NOT going to compusa for computer parts....they are almost always over priced and their sales people are complete morons, same can be said for any place...best buy, circut city to name a few. Last time i went out to buy something I went to radio shack for a simple cable for my camera....camera-usb cable to be exact...the guy said they didnt have it..so i looked around a bit...and found it.....the only thing i have learned from shoping in stores is this...do not ask the sales person for anything...they know absolutly nada !!!