> The article definitely suggests that what you call a
> "just-in-time" retail infrastructure is actually a Mom-and-Pop retail
> infrastructure.
But Mom-and-Pop stores hooked up to a global supply chain. Weird as it sounds, much of the outsourcing craze in the US was an attempt to match or mimic this; but the US model is slash and burn, with each layer of the supply chain trying to maximize their own shareholder value at everyone else's expense. The Japanese model at its best is more like networks of cooperative producers, similar to the Central European machine tool industry (at its worst, it's as horrible as any capitalism around, of course).
-- Dennis