Quote:
Originally Posted by Dadhawk
Yep. We saw that even in the First86 program. While we got the first 86 (or so, not everybody bought the one allotted to them) we did not get the first 86 produced because we were able to select a color and a transmission type. I have a relatively low serial number (in the 200's) but there are people that bought their car well after mine that got a lower serial number. They basically held cars at the port and shipped only the ones that matched the order, but we did not know in advance which one would be purchased.
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My theory is that the ease of ordering things from places such as Amazon, Ebay or the 1,000s of other websites has skewed the perception of how quickly things should show up. When you can click "Buy Now" and an item shows up at your door two days later then that sort of personal delivery becomes the norm.
You only need to go back to the early 90s to remember how long things used to take. By the time you found what you wanted in a catalogue, sent a letter and cheque, the money cleared the bank, they processed your order by shuffling paper, and shipped it by sloth or snail it could easily be 6 or 8 weeks before your box of trim clips showed up at your door. Ordering a car through a dealer was much the same since they didn't just fill in some boxes on a form on a computer and click send but had to mail documents back and forth and wait while some guy sitting at a desk covered in actual paper sorted through everything and processed the order. Although now the info is processed in literally minutes it still takes time to build and ship the car so the gap seems worse.