Originally Posted by
Happy Feet
What the online store does is process the order the day it comes in, has a system of pulling the order at the warehouse and ships as soon as possible. That's the customer service model they have intentionally chosen. A local store could do the same but doesn't. They build a buffer of time for THEIR convenience, not the customers. It harkens back to a time when you could doo that because there was no competitor but fails when a new model comes along.
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Jeez did you miss the point--they haven't just "chosen" that model. They have invested and are investing a lot of money to make that model work. That's investment in a warehouse that has the item in stock, the staff to actually process the orders in real time, and transportation of the items to the shipping facilities. That's a bunch of overhead that is only acceptable in your pricing if its costs are distributed across a large number of sales.
Basically, for an LBS to compete on price and time online, they'd have to sink a really large risky investment in an area where there are already a bunch of very large-scale operators. It's the equivalent of claiming that LBS should manufacture bikes at the same price or better than Giant.