So I’ve wanted to spruce up the gazebo-thing in the backyard of the house I’m renting. Currently there are some decaying reed shades there that don’t block any sun or eyes. I would have hoped the landlord would help out a bit considering it’s an improvement I’m going to leave behind, but I hope too much. I miss owning property.

Anyway, I figured I would buy some faux ivy panels to lay over the outside. Better sun protection, more privacy, and looks sort-of nature-y.

Well I get on the Home Depot website and found two double-sided faux leave adjustable-length panels that looked appealing. Sweet. But alas there were none in stock at the local Home Depot that I could check out. I’ve been bitten too many times by shitty website product photos to make a decision based on them alone. So I did what a lot of people do now: Drop $2000 and buy them both and return the one I don’t end up using. Thank god for credit cards.

I ended up at the local Home Depot anyway some days later and decided I would have a look at trough-style flower beds for my front porch while also picking up another 24 ft set of string lights. What do you know, they have neither.

They had ~80 different types of large flower pots, but not a single trough-style planter.

They had 48ft length string light sets, but none that were about half that length.

That go me thinking how shit this system is. I want things in store so I can see in person if I want to buy them, but stores can only afford to stay open if they are selling things. So instead of stocking one of everything so everyone’s needs are met, they stock lots of “what sells.” But I can buy “what sells” online, so why the fuck would I go to a store for that?

What makes more sense is stores as showcases, but often the stores themselves are too costly to justify that. Online stores like Walmart, Home Depot, etc. are competing with drop-shippers on Amazon, they have to keep margins very low to make sales, so they can’t subsidize “showcase” stores.

The same goes for clothes too, which is why I can never find anything that fits me in stores. Apparently men who wear size small don’t shop in stores. Then the problem begets itself where small men don’t go into stores, then the stores optimize against them again. After a few cycles of that you see shops open up specifically for smaller guys, mostly limited to major cities at this point.

I though the free market was supposed to be intelligent and self correcting? But on the boundaries of the market (extreme investment requirements and extreme low margins) the ideal fades.