Just curious, does Micro Center even sell laptops online?

They are pretty clearly interested in being a retail store. If they don't want to ship out items/aren't set up to ship out items like it shows on their website directly, I highly doubt a "Community" message board for tech users is making business decisions for the company, lol.

Looking at their main site they are set up to be a physical store, it's only listed about everywhere about visiting one of the locations. You can look at the store locations they have on their main site which is on teh very top bar by the search https://www.microcenter.com/site/stores/default.aspx

I'll add on to what @GavinT has already answered. We do have ICC (Inventory Control Coordinators) at each store that handle inventory coming into stores, but shipping out isn't exactly simple just based on the design of their receiving depot alone. Received goods are palletized and wrapped to help protect the product. None of our stores are outfitted with the means to properly pack product for individual parcel shipping. You also have to factor in how product is carried. When an online reservation is made, store employees go through the store and hand-pick product from the sales floor to reserve on behalf of customers. These must be scanned through our POS to remove the inventory from the website to properly reflect stock, otherwise you would have other customers looking for inventory that is no longer available. If we allow online orders to ship out through the stores, maintaining an accurate reflection of in-store inventory is going to be difficult. It's also going to drive up traffic in-store as more sales staff is tied up shopping on behalf of online customers. Ideally we'd have an off-site depot hold inventory to ship from (completely separate from in-store inventory), but I personally don't know enough on that subject to comment on the logistics. I do however share your opinion that I would like to see our online offerings expand.

As for the phone number not being easily available, I know this was a change that occurred around COVID. We were pushing to get more interaction through chat, email and the community forum to help customers avoid long phone queues since there was a massive surge in contacts during the work from home days. I can check to see if there is any plan to reinstate the number online.

The subject of products being available online and whether their shipping status has changed recently, that's going to be a bit more difficult to answer. Our phone support reps can't really see when the shippable flags change in the POS, these are defined by the buyers and there isn't really a notice when these change. If notice were given, there would be hundreds of thousands of emails coming through on any new products entered into the POS which wouldn't be ideal. We also have no insight into whether they will be available for shipping going forward with the tools we have available to us either. I can tell you from experience that if products are not classed as shippable from the start, it's extremely unlikely that they will be going forward. I do recall that we had tools to check if products were on order or EOL, but I don't think we had access to numbers or dates. As in, we could say "This SKU is on-order", but not "We have 60 coming next Tuesday". The reason that information isn't readily available is because purchase orders can fall through. This results in us receiving partial orders, mixed orders (X of one SKU, Y of another to compensate) or the PO is cancelled entirely in favor of newer product revisions. Technology changes so fast that we often do not forecast too far ahead so we can get the latest versions of products. There are certainly exceptions to products that do not change often (cables, chassis, tools, etc.) but for systems, it's by far the hardest to forecast. If a new CPU launches in Q1 and you sell a ton of laptops with that processor in Q1, you can't use those figures to forecast through Q3, as the hype will die down and people will be holding off on buying in favor of waiting for the next generation, if that makes sense.

All of this is why I am glad I am in the engineering field and not the merchandise field.

The "email when available" button is definitely some feedback I can get behind. I'll pass that along to the web team to see whether this is something that can be implemented with the current system.

I am not seeing any shipping flags for this notebook. I do see it's classed as a "top selling item" which means it is something we will likely be ordering to keep stock up. I can reach out to the buyer on your behalf but I can't guarantee this will be reclassed. In the event that it remains classed as in-store only, you might still have a few options to try.

1. If a friend lives near a Micro Center store, have them purchase the system on your behalf and ship it. This would be the easiest solution, though it does require some trust with a potentially long distance friend.
2. Attempt to see if a local retailer can match our price. While we prefer to avoid sending customers to competitors, sometimes that is what it takes in order to take care of the customer. Keep in mind that some stores may have policies to only price match local retailers or retailers with online stock available, so there isn't a guarantee that this will work.
3. Lastly, you can private message me the state that you live in and we can see if the nearest local Micro Center store can assist. I'll forewarn you that this is not something we normally do, and the answer will likely be no, but it's always worth asking.

No worries, I'll send you a message. For future reference, if you click my name, there should be a button that says "message" on the right hand side.

Keep an eye out for my private message.

As for whether this SKU was previously available online, I can't see that through any of my tools, but I'll ask the buyer if that was ever the case. They should know.