Were direct sale supply chains often less costly without retail stores than a supply chain of retail stores?

A distributor for Celanese Chemical Company stores large quantities of chemicals, blends these chemicals to satisfy the requests of customers, and delivers the blends to a customer’s warehouse within 24 hours of receiving an order. What utilities does this distributor provide?

Customer purchases using credit cards are a significant source of revenue for many retailers. From the standpoint of a retailer, briefly discuss some advantages and disadvantages of a retail store having its own credit card as opposed to accepting one of the national credit cards (e.g., Visa, MasterCard).

Today's holistic marketers view the entire supply chain as a ___. A) cost center B) healthy competitor C) profit center D) holdover from the pre-internet era E) value network