And a for cr@p can't order from it website . . . . .
Oh, this is to be expected from an old-school electronics store. If you think train shop inventory is difficult to manage in the one-each detail required by web ordering, electronics components... OMG. A couple of orders of magnitude worse. Seriously.
This is especially true for shops that deal in surplus. I have a good friend in the biz. Odd lots don't come pre-inventoried. You buy a pile of (mostly) crap in hopes you can get salable stock, cull any value from it, and dump it into bins. You don't even count it. One time I was helping her out at one of their stores, and in "tidying up" (sorely needed), I started to re-bin the resistors that had fallen out of the stacked lazy susan bins. One by one. She admonished me, "Just sweep 'em up, Mikey! We have less than a penny each in those! Not worth your time!"
Can you imagine translating that kind of stock into a web storefront? There would be several times more money spent on the accounting than the hardware. You have to pick your battles.
