micky wrote:


But I do prefer to buy things locally. If I were not old and fat and
worried about Corona, I wouldn't rely on mail order (and grocery
delivery) so much, and I hope to go back to normal within a year.

I think you would enjoy the experience. Take my store.

1) Wash hands at entrance. Portable fountain with foot pump
to make water flow. Rather than alcohol dispenser like a Walmart,
it's some sort of foam soap stuff. Maybe the owner makes it
in a big washtub in his basement.

2) Escorted by your very own assistant. Now allowed
to wander around store. This also means the head count inside
the store, is very strictly limited.

3) Not allowed to finger items. Point to item,
assistant collects it for you. This is how I ended up with my
weird new keyboard for the Test Machine, all I could do was
point at it, then get it home and discover what I'd got.

4) The pair of you walk to the front and pay.

This means it's best if you work from a home-prepared
list, before you "shop". "shop" being the comedic word
for this Brinks Security notion of shopping.

It's still convenient, because if you need an SSD at 9AM,
you can get one.

But in terms of web listing, versus store stock, not
many items are fully stocked. You can expect to find
hard drives in stock. There are racks behind the counter
with those. If you need an 18TB WDC Gold for $500, they'll
have exactly one.

You would expect video cards and AMD Ryzen processors, to be
a big fat zero. But web cams have come back. There's a few
Logitech in stock. There will always be Intel processors, because
they spend their days creating new SKUs with the word "... Lake"
in the name. "Apology Lake".

Paul