Obligatory damn clankers.
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2026
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I mean, very few people buy peanut butter that hasn’t been manufactured yet.
But lots of things can be pre ordered before they're actually available.
Services are an obvious example: I can buy tickets to a movie or a live event that will happen at some point in the future. Same with really any tickets or prepaid reservations, like plane tickets or hotel reservations or certain types of restaurant reservations.
But it can happen with all sorts of consumer goods, too. I can put in orders for stuff to be made to order: handmade/custom jewelry or shirts or mugs or commissioned artwork, a pizza that won't be made until I order it, etc.
For businesses, their supply chains require advance planning and ordering. The people who make peanut butter generally have the peanuts ordered before the start of the growing season, so they're buying peanuts that might not have been planted yet. The grocery store chain might be buying peanut butter before it's made.
When pork futures prices drop low enough, McDonald's will snatch up those contracts and take delivery of a bunch of pork to make McRibs and make them available for a limited time. At the time they buy the contracts (that is, order the pork), the pigs might not even be alive yet, much less slaughtered and processed.
None of this is defending the memory contracts, but the idea of buying things in the future is pretty common in the economy.
Oh absolutely, all that is true.
The pbj sandwich is just a useless comparison though.
The peanut butter you buy a month from now hasn't been manufactured yet but the grocery store already has their order in. The grocery store is borrowing money to pay wages for shifts that haven't been worked yet. The peanut butter manufacturer is placing orders to peanut farms for peanuts that haven't been harvested yet. The shipping truck manufacturer is putting in orders for tires, wheels, locking mechanisms, and trailers that don't exist yet, so on and so forth for almost everything in the supply chain.
No great injustice, just business as usual.
“Putting in orders” is not the same as “buying”.
The peanut butter I buy in a month hasn’t been manufactured, and if it’s not there in a month I’m not buying it.
The grocery store might be borrowing money but they’re not paying wages for hours that haven’t been worked. They’re doing their best to not even pay wages for hours that have been worked.
The peanut butter example might be overly simplistic, especially because it compares b2c to b2b, but other than that the original point is actually correct.
In B2B it's very common to order things before they are manufactured. If a company orders 100 new company cars, it's very rare that the car dealership (or even the car manufacturer) has all 100 of them on their yard, ready to be taken away.
Especially when you are talking about large-scale b2b purchasing, it's very common that orders are taken months or even years in advance.
And here we aren't even talking about regular "my company needs to buy 100 RAM sticks to upgrade the laptops", but we are talking about manufacturing deals. They always order stuff like RAM chips way in advance, even if only to secure reliable and predictable pricing and availability.
The original point is accurate but very basic. The comparison to buying sandwich components on a credit card is irrelevant garbage.
If the peanut butter isn't there, you won't buy it. But everyone in the peanut butter supply chain is behaving as though it will be on the shelf when you need it.
I’m actually not too bothered by the cost of RAM right now, not looking to upgrade my PC.
You’re being a dick though so this conversation is done.