Yes and the solution is to have a warehouse of stuff that makes the stuff close by. But you probably need lots of manufactures to make that warehouse make sense

Yes and the solution is to have a warehouse of stuff that makes the stuff close by. But you probably need lots of manufactures to make that warehouse make sense. etc. When I was doing my master's degree I would bike down to Rotterdam where the largest importer of piping supplies in Europe was. I just wandered off the street and every part imaginable they could just pull off the shelf for me. I was converting all kinds of wild stuff, from metric to imperial and vice versa, there are about a billion different thread standards and manufacturing standards, they had convertors for everything. And cheap stuff to go the distance. The funny thing was, I didn't know it was there, there was an Italian researcher visiting that told me about it. However, he said that in Italy where he did his research he needed to travel over an hour to get to something similar. After that, I realized there were many pieces of my project that had large warehouses like this in Rotterdam due to the harbour. They often had tiny little windows with people with plus 20/30 years of experience, just taking orders, and coming up with solutions for your problems with a list of parts that would get you there. Then you would walk away with 50 bits, and a bill that was less than 40 euros. Madness.