At a time when local photo stores grudgingly offered 10 percent off to professional photographers only, 47th Street Photo and the other mail-order advertisers in Popular Photography were giving discounts of 25 percent to everyone. But, even so, the selection's not as good as it could be, and I fear there's going to be some backsliding this year that will directly affect the onesie-twosie buyers selecting PCs for home or small businesses. An SKU is a stock-keeping unit, and it means one configuration in one box. The idea, from the retailers' perspective, is to sell those SKUs quickly, hence velocity.
Buying patterns tend to fall along somewhat predictable lines.
It's unlikely you'll want to combine a 166-MHz CPU with 64MB of RAM and a DVD drive. But you may not be able to find what you want in stock if you're a small business or individual buyer. That's 768 possible permutations and perhaps two dozen serious configuration options that might make sense to you as a consumer. Of course, if you're a corporate buyer, there's no problem with customization. Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and others are gearing to custom build PCs on demand.