I often point out an anecdote from my early e-commerce days in the late 90s where a customer wanted in-store pickup like everyone else they saw on the web doing. But they just had purchased an already outdated (but IBM so nobody got fired) Point Of Sale system for 40 stores which did inventory management as a batch at the close of business each day over Frame Relay lines or even dialup. The concept of a VPN was alien to them.

Since they were selling some limited edition high priced items that were allocated to each store, there were often only 1 or 2 at a given location of what would be a popular item.

So you can imagine when I explained that the huge investment in the legacy system just a few years before was a big blocker for ‘pick up in store’.

I think we had to hardcode something that would remove an item for sale online if there were less than 2 left or some awful hack like that to reduce customer complaints.