I think the UK loan system is pretty much optimum. It's a "can't pay don't pay" system. Even on £40k gross my payments are £1710 a year, leaving £28k after deductions (not including pension).
Decreasing lead time in manufacturing has dramatically changed the world during your lifetime. There are lots of unsolved problems in computational logistics that look like tsp. We have whole conferences on heuristics to shorten their runtimes. e.g. [1] And there are more.
Hundreds of PhDs will be working today on just that topic.
The irony of this is that phrase is actually the answer to "why isn't anyone buy my stuff?", and the answer is "because they don't think it is good enough value and the customer is always right".
Good marketing doesn't ask "what do you want" it asks "what problems do you have".
The tale told about Ford is they old "they would have said they wanted faster horses". And that's why Ford didn't have a market research department for a hundred years. This, like many things Ford did (e.g. full vertical integration), was poor a strategy.
One suggestion is to include the actual price of delivery instead of "free delivery" (or discounted) into the displayed price.
Swift delivery is changing our expectations. If I knew it would take a week to come I would plan ahead, instead I can buy on impulse. Of course the real costs are being externalised, on the poor drivers but also on congested roads and pollution.
Use "if someone in your family won the lottery"