One owner removed. I`m sorry, this inventory preoccupation is "one way of looking at it", before everyone had an MBA, we looked at things differently. I remember going to a car dealer parts counter to get a part for my car, and they didn`t have it. The parts guy picked up a clipboard that said "lost sales" at the top and wrote down the part number. I asked him what that was for. He said the parts manager wanted to know every time they lost a sale by not having a part in stock, so they could consider stocking that part, rather than the customer going to another dealer (he also said that it applied to internal consumption, every time they didn`t have a part that was needed for a service customer, the customer had to bring the car back again, effecting what we would call today "customer satisfaction"). That dealer is still in business, decades later, so I guess their policy of wanting to have more inventory didn`t force them to not make payroll and go out of business. And to stay with the car dealer example, dealers today have a gazillion dollars in cash and loans tied up in HAVING A HUGE INVENTORY OF VEHICLES. Why? So they can make the sale, and the customer doesn`t go to another dealer.
They just don`t give a crap anymore about what happens after the sale, helped by the fact that all the dealers do it now, so you (the customer) has to live with it. That brings us to a "reality" that`s actually a choice.