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This is funny. Amazon is the 21st century Sears! Back in the early to mid 1900s you could buy anything from Sears including houses! http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/1915-1920.htm
Sears decided to move away from "catalog" sales in the 70s-90s. Really too bad since they could have been Amazon instead of Amazon.

They even sold entire houses.

Those were the days. Cars, houses, plows, flour, medicines to "restore female regularity" . . . Sears had it all.

If you get a chance to see it, the National Archives has a short film by the Ford Motion Picture Laboratories Educational Weekly series about prefab houses like the Sears House. "Home Made," from 1919, shows a young engaged couple deciding to buy a prefab house, shows the manufacturing processes behind it, and finally the on-site construction. It even has the cute "calendar page tear-off" device to indicate the passage of time.

It inspired Buster Keaton, who did his own take -- including the calendar gimmick -- in a short: One Week (1920). That one's worth the 19 minutes of your time to see.

They even sold entire houses.

Not to mention, (I can only speak for North America) we actually have a long tradition of prefabricated housing, even from before modularized building was possible. E.g., Sears Modern Homes

Seriously, though, I'd like to read more about Sears and the distribution solution. Wikipedia didn't really have anything. Any links?

No one seems to have described the "schedule system" in detail on line. It gets a brief mention in the Sears archives. Not much detail, though.

The obvious way to do fulfillment is to have order pickers, each with a few orders to pick, going through the storage aisles picking items, then delivering them to the packing and shipping area. That works if the inventory isn't too big. Safeway, for example, does on line shopping that way, with pickers running around retail grocery stories.

But the time to pick goes up with the size of the inventory, as the pickers have to travel further. The next idea is to divide up the orders by section, so that the items from each order are fanned out to different departments and picked by pickers in those departments. Then the picked partial orders have to be brought together for assembly. That creates a sorting problem, and as the volume goes up, the order assembly area tends to choke with work in progress.

The "schedule system" is a variant on picking by department. Orders are divided up by department at the front end of the process, where orders are read and pick slips produced. (Sears had to do this by hand in 1895, of course.) The pick slips specify a time slot and a bin number. Time slots were originally 45 minutes long. During a time slot, the pickers in each department work only on orders assigned to that time slot, picking items and putting them in small bins which travel on chutes and conveyors to the order assembly area, which has a receiving bin for each order being processed in that time slot. At the end of the time slot, the pickers switch to the next set of orders, even if something didn't get picked in time.

At the end of the time slot, all the bins in the order assembly area are replaced with empty bins, and the filled bins go to order checking and shipping. The original order is checked against the bin contents, anything missing is deducted from the charges and perhaps queued for another try on a later day, and the order is packed and shipped. Meanwhile, the next set of orders is being picked.

With this system, the pickers are only working on a moderate number of orders at a time, and only have to look within their own department. If they get behind during a time slot, some orders will be partially filled, and that gets caught in order assembly and retried. Order checking, packing, and shipping can be fanned out to as many assembly stations as necessary, and more stations can be staffed and brought on line if there's a backlog.

In the pre-computer era, this was a good way to coordinate an operation spread across acres of multi-story buildings. The order-checking phase of order assembly generates a ticket for each error, and those indicate what needed to be adjusted - too few pickers in one department, or too many out-of-stock reports from one department. It also provides a retry mechanism which doesn't stall out picking. This makes a huge operation manageable.

The biggest difference in modern fulfillment is that today, the inventory is known at the front end of order processing. If something is out of stock, no attempt is made to pick it. Manual systems have to carry more inventory to avoid pick fails. Systems today aren't tied to a rigid timetable, and there's a lot of bar coding and RFID tagging to track products and bins as they move around. But the fan-out-to-department and fan-in-to-assembly structure remains, since that's what gives the improvement from O(N*M) to O(N*log(M)). This is just like converting from a bubble sort to a merge sort.

This field is called "industrial engineering", which is about how to organize work so that it gets done efficiently. Anybody who supervises more than about 10 people needs to know the basics of this. Unfortunately, too many managers don't.

This is a way to close a loophole the online retailers are using to give themselves a leg up over brick and mortar stores.

The Sears catalog was first issued in 1888, 120 years ago:
http://www.searsarchives.com/catalogs/chronology.htm

Out of state purchases have been happening for over a century. It sure took NY a long time to get upset about it. The difference with Amazon is they're doing it better than it's ever been done before. So because Amazon is succeeding too well, NY wants a piece of the action. I say leave Amazon alone. Let NY cut some fat out of their system rather than trying to find new ways to squeeze the taxpayer.

You can view information on those homes and some images of all the styles and prices here. It's pretty fascinating, but keep in mind the prices may have increased since 1940.

A favorite contraption. I loved my Skat Skoota and my Erector Set. I can still get Erector Sets but I have never seen another Skat Skoota since the one I wore out by the mid-80's. *sniff*