Understand these points
- Lost of folks placed pre-orders, and even more folks placed orders after announcment of the new cameras
- The retailers knew only when shipments from Canon would begin...they did not necessarily know how rapidly their backorders from Canon would arrive...they might know that cameras came crated in quanities of 100 per crate, but not now many crates would ship to them in what timeframe.
- If Canon USA could not get enough from Canon factory in Japan, they would have to wait for later shipments from Japan before sending more shipments to retailers.
When goods are still scarce and backlog of demand needs to be filled, they are on allocation from the factory to distributor, then on allocation from distributor to retailers, and then the retailers can ship order First In, First Out realiest orders shipped first (unless certain customers had placed bulk orders worthy of special consideration, like perhaps
National Geographic ordering 500 for its staff photographers)
So you can see that no one really knows when they are all in line to receive back ordered goods, at each and every step of the product distribution daisychain. In such uncertainty, only highly optimistic guesses of ship date and recieve date can really be provide to anyone. the factory might know how many go to Canon USA vs to Canon Europe vs. Canon Far East, and Canon USA might know what dates to expect how many, and then they might have allocations to retailers based on when the order was received from which retailer. But then that all assumes there are no transportation logistical glitches that slow down shipments, completely out of Canon control.
