[ghaff]

>I bet Dell still keeps an inventory, it's just a vastly reduced one.

That's pretty common. I can walk into an Apple store and walk out with one of a variety of models. However, many memory and disk configs will have to be special-ordered and I'll have to wait a couple of weeks.

I expect if car selling moved to more of a BTO system, you'd see dealers/factory stores stocking some level of popular model/trim package/color combinations but everything else would be weeks to months to get.