The term supply chain management was only invented in 1982, but the 44 years since have seen a revolution—not a word I use lightly—in how firms manufacture, assemble, and deliver their products. Between 1965 and 2020, adjusted for inflation, real transport costs declined by up to 62% by value. If you were old enough to order products back in the 1990s, do you remember how long it took to receive them? Typically it was five to seven days.

Now we live in a world of instant gratification. Five to seven days shrank to three, then two, and today often just one. Same-day delivery is a reality for thousands of products and millions of Americans. If businesses can make drones work, we could have thirty-minute delivery for a large array of smaller products. And to be sure, this is a wonderful thing. When I order something from an e-commerce site, it’s usually extremely convenient—and sometimes necessary—to receive it quickly. And compared to a decade ago, the amount of time I spend in shopping center parking lots, going from store to store to track down something I need, has probably dropped by eighty or even ninety percent. Except for groceries, shopping in person is something I now typically do for pleasure, not out of necessity. It’s not just instant gratification; it’s instant everything.

But all this aside, faster isn’t always better. Imagine you sit down at a restaurant where the kitchen is efficient and you have your main course in less than ten minutes. Perhaps you’re in a hurry, and if so, that’s great. But what if you were expecting a leisurely meal and conversation—the idea of slow food? When that happens to me, I’m disappointed. As a result, I’ve taken to spacing out my appetizer and main course orders to prevent it from occurring. I understand the restaurant’s incentive: faster courses mean faster turns. But I didn’t sit down to become another component to be optimized—to be treated as throughput.

I’m not going to argue against speed—at all. When I’m picking up a coffee on my walk to the office, ordering a prescription because I’m sick, or buying a gift for a host on the way to a party, I want that item as quickly as I can get it. And I’m thankful to live in a time when it’s possible to get nearly anything almost immediately, often without leaving my home.

What I’m going to argue is that just because speed is good for many things, we shouldn’t assume it’s good for everything. That would be a fallacy of faulty generalization.

I’m also going to argue that even though slowness may be good for some things, it needs to be organic and transparent. Slowness that is opaque, or that takes away from the buyer’s dignity, is something the luxury industry needs to avoid.

Rolex is building a new US headquarters in Manhattan. Designed by David Chipperfield Architects, it’ll be tall and dramatic:

A story on this recently ran on Reddit, including the note that the first four floors would be a massive Rolex boutique, the first of its kind in the world. This prompted an anonymous Redditor to reply, “Great. It’ll have four floors of no watches.”

Rolex is famous—or infamous, depending on your point of view—for not being the kind of watchmaker who will just, you know, sell you a watch. If you walk up to a Rolex boutique out of the blue, they often won’t have any watches for sale, and if they do, they’ll either be less-popular models or incredibly expensive references. They almost certainly won’t have the most in-demand models, like the Submariner or the GMT-Master II.

Is a popular model what you’re after? They’ll add you to a list. How many people are on the list? Many. How often does the model you’re interested in come in? From time to time. How long will it take before you “get the call”? It’s hard to say. Will it help if you buy non-Rolex items from the boutique? It won’t hurt. What if you have a really good story for why you want it? They’ll listen, but no promises. Should you add yourself to lists at other boutiques? They don’t love that but can’t stop you.

If independent analysts are to be believed, at their current prices, Rolex could sell four million watches per year, but instead chooses to cap production at or slightly above one million. I think it’s arguable whether that’s an example of artificial scarcity, but let’s allow for good intentions here. Rolex could raise prices to bring supply and demand into equilibrium, but again, they choose not to do so, and again, we’ll allow for good intentions.

The problem is that when demand so exceeds supply, it leads to market distortions. In the case of Rolex, it’s the gray market. People who buy Rolexes know that in many cases, they can flip them—either directly to a buyer or to a gray market dealer—and make a healthy profit. Rolex doesn’t like that and tries to prevent it by vetting customers (continued interest over long periods of time as demonstrated by waiting on lists and checking in a regular basis) and by making that moment when someone can say they “got the call” (as the saying on watch forums goes) so psychologically rewarding that they don’t want to give up their newly acquired watch.

Market forces are like Play-Doh: if you squeeze it, it’s going to come out somewhere. Rolex caps production, so demand is high. They keep prices below market, which leads to a gray market. They use lists to try to foil the gray market, but it doesn’t always work. They track down gray market watches and cut off their supply lines, but new ones spring up. It’s never-ending.

The problem I’m concerned with here isn’t the economics, and it’s definitely not the waiting period. For many people, buying a Rolex—especially their first Rolex—is a momentous occasion. It’s perfectly reasonable to think that might involve a wait, perhaps of a year or more. The problem is the lack of transparency. How long is your boutique’s list and where are you on it? How many lists are out there? How many people around the world are ahead of you in line? Can anyone cut ahead of you?

I can imagine a different system. What would it look like? To answer that, we have to first look at an example of a luxury product with a long wait time that works well…