I don't actually understand how retail stores stay in business

Cleaning the roof. Nice dry day, the pine needles are so dry they're flaky. I brushed a bunch of them down the roof to the gutter so I could pick them up (I'm not allowed up on the roof anymore). They were so dry that it was like trying to pick up handfuls of flour.

HEY, I thought to myself, I should just vacuum them up with my shop vac.

That worked swell for the ones I could reach, but a lot of debris was out of reach.

HEY, I thought to myself, it sure would be nice if I had an extension wand for my vac. I used to have a few extensions for my old vac (1.25" hose) but the new vac is 1.75" (and greater suction). Why don't I buy a couple wand extensions, I thought to myself.

Looked online at HomeDepot.com and they showed five wands in my local store. Got dressed, got in my car, drove the ten minutes to HD, found the shop vac aisle, found the wand extension bin.

It was empty.

Checked all over the vac accessories, no 1.75" wands anywhere.

Tried for ten minutes to try to get a sales associate's attention. Finally got his attention, and he pawned me off to another associate. I explained to the other associate what I was looking for, and that their online inventory showed five wands in stock. He retraced my steps, looking in the wand drawer (still empty), looking to the left of the wands (still no wands) and to the right of the wands (still again no wands). He took out his little handheld scanner and scanned the barcode on the shelf. Yep, he said, it shows we have five. "I wonder where they are?"

I said, "Possibly they're in one of those boxes up there," pointing to the overstock 12 feet above our heads. "Yep, possibly," he said. He scanned the barcode again and came up with a SKU number. We squinted at the boxes, way up on the top shelf, and found one that maybe, possibly was the right number (it was hard to read from that far away.)

"Let me go get a ladder," he said.

Ten minutes later he comes gallumping down the aisle with a 12' roll-about staircase. It takes another two minutes to position it in front of the boxes. He scampers up the ladder, and warns me to "stand back" in case he drops a box. He grabs the suspect box (which was under two other boxes) and brings it down and opens it up. Yep, there's the wands.

Next time I'm going with Amazon overnight delivery. Probably cheaper anyway.

There are a handful of products -- okay, a lot more than a handful -- that I've fallen in love with over the years only to see them disappear from store shelves shortly afterward.  It's kind of a running joke with me and the Mrs, as soon as we find something wonderful it's discontinued.

I used to run all over town, checking the usual and the unusual stores, looking for any remaining stock.  I could spend WEEKS looking for something.

No more.  Now that Amazon sells groceries, and delivers in 24 hours, I look there for stuff the local stores have discontinued.  This week's examples:

• Dad's root beer water flavoring
  
• Thai peanut sauce packets (mixes with coconut milk)
  
• lemon poppyseed muffin mix
  

I'm convinced at this point they are tax write-offs.

Also, the capitalist class wants some slave labor for its money. The notion of just paying people a minimum wage is so terribly distasteful that they'd rather keep brick and mortar stores (that double as write offs) rather than just admitting the age of strip malls and big box stores is over.