Similar to Oahu Dave.
And before now I would have said they were a really good company because of their solid product and repair service. But they don’t make it anymore. However, I did find some online and bought two. From a vendor on the other side of the freakin’ world. Hopefully they’ll last me a good long while.
Well, yeah, as there’s exactly one major sunglasses retail chain in the US… but I concur completely. Every minor fringe search I make loads up my search lists and news summaries for weeks. (I did a quick search to see if a singer named Grammer was related to Kelsey. She wasn’t. I got headlines about KG’s sleazy life for months.)
I can totally get behind this rant - drives me mental, too, to the point where if I find something I really like (especially clothing) I might buy a second one to put way for when the first wears out.
And as someone who worked in retail, the “too many people would buy it” thing does make some twisted sense.
If a company has decided to discontinue a model (perhaps because it no longer fits their brand image or it’s been rendered obsolete by “better” technology), then keeping it around is problematic, no matter how popular it might have been.
A good example is when the iPhone 5 came out, pretty much instantly all the big peripherals using the iPhone 4 jacks got discontinued. Things like docking stations, radios which could charge iPods and play music from them, that sort of thing.
Now, obviously, there were a shitload of iPhone/iPod 4s (and earlier) floating about, but we had people coming into the store long after the iPhone 5 had been released trying in vain to find a replacement Stereo/Docking Station for the iPod 4.
But they were all discontinued, coinciding with the arrival of the iPhone 5 and its totally different connector.
My aunt and uncle bought me a watch when I was in high school for Xmas – it was one of those ones with the suns and moons on it. I LOVED that watch, it was so pretty. Well, eventually it stopped working. (And fixing it would cost more than the watch itself) I wanted to replace it, but they stopped making it. (I can get it on ebay, but it’s really expensive). My best bet would be to find one that’s similiar. 
[QUOTE=Llama Llogophile]
This seems to happen to me all the time. Products I like morph into variants I no longer want, and the traits that I liked in the first place no longer exist in their descendants.
[/QUOTE]
Hey! You’re challenging the fundamental basis of the computer industry!
What are you, a Communist?
Don’t get me started on the decline and fall of Rockport shoes, or the disappearance of comfortable jeans-type pants in non-jeans colors.
I’ve worked for the largest grocery wholesaler, and we probably offered 5-6 times as many products as the average supermarket stocked. And stores were constantly trying out new items to see if they would sell in their area, and dropping other ones that weren’t selling enough. Choosing which items to keep/drop is a major task of store managers.
So those products are quite likely still available to the supermarket. Thus you can go to the manager and request that he order some for you. Minimum order is usually 1 case, and the store manager may require you to agree to buy the whole case, but most spice mixtures will keep for quite a while, so you could do that.
I bought a box of 500 #10 envelopes (back when stuff was sent by mail). Still have a couple of hundred.
In the early 80’s I bought a box of 100 rubber bands
I have more staples than I would use if I live to age 1000.
I buy printer paper by the carton - find a “Store Opening” sale and get one for $20
I buy shoes at 3 pairs at pop - if I can find shoes that fit and look like I want, why go through the hassle of shopping again?
Diphenhydramine is $20 for 1000.
See a pattern?
If it doesn’t have an expiration date, make your selection count.
(do I need to point out other paper products?)
I find myself posting the same thing over and over in any thread about retail. It’s about three things: price differentiation, price differentiation, and price differentiation.
If there is a really good value product in the range, and everyone knows it, then no one will buy the top of the range product, which is where the most profit lies.
Every time our consumer reporting association (“Choice”) does a survey of, say, a particular white good, and discovers that one of the products is cheap or mid priced but objectively waaaay better than the high priced stuff it is immediately discontinued and unless you buy one very quickly it will be gone. The last thing the manufacturers want is market knowledge that their mid-pricepoint model is better or as good as their high pricepoint model.
Sunglass Hut is a good example because it’s part of the practical monopoly on eyeglasses and sunglasses held by Luxottica. Before Luxottica acquired Ray-Ban, they were moderately priced items that were quite popular. Almost immediately, they jacked up the price to $100 or $125 a pair, without actually changing anything. Oakley tried to buck Luxottica’s cartel pricing, so Luxottica locked them out of all the retail channels it controls, Oakley’s stock tanked, and Luxottica bought it up cheap.
Glasses are a total racket. I don’t know why the Antitrust Division doesn’t go after them.
Stupid, stupid Me! Curiosity got the best of me, and just had to fucking know what the hell a “Fisherman Sandal” was, so clicked that link.
Now, every page I look at has a picture of the Ugliest Fucking Shoe I’ve ever seen! :mad:
Sorry. I’ll wear my dress boots should we ever attend a Dopefest together. 
I have a lot of trouble finding comfortable, long-wearing everyday shoes, and Dunham’s tough-leather sandals were the best. I don’t like open-toe sandals, most are designed to last about one summer, and as a California boy I prefer the next thing to barefoot if I can’t actually go barefoot. I hate wearing closed shoes.
So like the OP, I’m pretty pissed that Dunham decided to drop the one shoe in their line that was a perfect fit, in all regards, and one with no competing models.
Another reason for certain items running out of stock: “group production”. You can define groups of your products, so by defining “I’m going to make 10 pallets of Ice Cream Group”, you get orders for X boxes of vanilla ice cream, Y of chocolate and Z of strawberry, with the pallets packed up in the same X:Y:Z ratio. Those pallets then get sent to the stores.
If a company looks at their sales for all three types of ice cream and sees they’re selling at more or less constant ratios across the market (pretty common with “cow” products), and they define a group, then they send the same ratios of the component products to every single store. So if it turns out that store 1’s customers are vanilla fiends while store 2’s are all about the chocolate, the customers in 1 will grab the vanilla off the stocker’s hands before she can put them on the freezer and those in 2 will be asking “how come you guys never have any chocolate? Unless I happen to get here just as you’re stocking it, I can’t get any! Does it fly?” Yes, yes it does… in store 2, in 1 they’re sick of it.
This doesn’t lead to a permanent “not available any more”, but sometimes it feels as if.
When I lived in China I had this attitude: if there’s something you like in the store, buy it all, because they’re never likely to stock it again. This is in regards to Western stuff in Chinese stores, of course. Places like Metro were fairly consistent.
Well, if you won’t make the effort to have AdBlocker or UBlock running, get used to that.
Building off Nava’s point: One other potential factor for this is that corporate may have a model for how much business each store is supposed to do, based upon their generic, nationally averaged expected sales. This is a relatively easy rubric for the corporate HQ to use to judge how well a store is doing: If it is selling the same relative fraction of a given product as the other national stores, the assumption seems to be that it’s working well with the recommended plan.
If, however, an individual store starts doing major business in a single brand or other category, corporate doesn’t see that as a sign that the store is doing extra well with just that one category - but rather that the store is underperforming in all other categories compared to the national model and the amount of business the store is doing in that one brand or category. Thus selling great truckloads of that one brand of sunglasses would have corporate come crashing down on the store’s management demanding that they fix what’s wrong with their store, because if they’ve got enough traffic to sell all those Brand Q sunglasses, they should be doing land office business in all these other categories as well.
It’s easier to simply avoid being the high standing nail by refusing to sell that brand/category, than to risk sticking out and getting hammered for it.
I have one that really is unavailable because it was discontinued by the manufacturer. I forget which company it was but they had a line of boxed Chinese ‘dinner kits’ called Wanchai Ferry. Simply awesome stuff! Really good and easy to make, just add the meat. Alas, it is no more. 
They had a frozen version but it wasn’t the same as the boxed and really pretty much sucked.
There’s two awesome life changing products that have seemingly been pulled off the shelves:
-Irish Spring Body Wipes: these were pre-moistened wash rag sized cloths you could pull out anywhere and basically wipe yourself down with no matter how sweaty, and then enter in a social situation without smelling like you haven’t bathed for three days even though you didn’t get a chance to shower. Seems to have disappeared 2004ish. The closest Ive been able to find are Dude Wipes, but they are one fourth the size and seem like glorified baby wipes.
-Vaseline Intensive Care Spray Moisturizer-carried by Rite Aid, now on clearance. I suffer from lizard like dry skin from heaters during the Winter. Instead of having to rub down with moisturizing lotions for 15 minutes a day, I just sprayed my upper torso with this stuff after a shower, and moved on with my day. When seeing the clearance I bought about 8 cans this Fall but wont know what will happen when I run out by Spring 2017.
Honorable mention is No-Doz, pulled by Bayer after some sort of pill mixup. Its back on the market, but the new version gives me headaches and I chew on Rite Aid generic versions instead!
Yes, Im a very fucked up individual.:eek::eek::eek:
the traffic/weather channels on SiriusXM have been broadcasting “This content is currently unavailable” for a few days now.
We run into this all the time, as our area is one of the test markets for new products for our local grocery store chain. We find something new that we really love, it’s on the shelves for 6-12 months, just long enough to get really used to it, then gone! If we’re really lucky it may come back a couple of years later as a regular product, but most of them don’t.
I have over 3 years supply of Vitamin E. 2 for 1 sale and then I kept finding more bottles around the house that I had taken some and then misplaced the bottle.