That is easier and CSAs are totally legal. Pre-season you sell shares and every week you redeem shares for produce. That should actually be able to be done on bitshares (i think, but IANAL). The farmers markets where I've lived have lots of farms doing that, and I've bought shares before (and ended up with more collard greens than I know what to do with some weeks!)
That sounds much better.
Perhaps every industry will get used to pre-ordering products.
With 3D printing on the rise I can imagine the market will allow for more specialised products made to order with a bulk order discount if you're willing to wait for x other customers to commit to the order.
This is where you'd use the UIA to represent a product that will be produced in the future once a threshold number of UIA's have been bought. (This assumes that it is still cheaper to make items in bulk.)
A wholesaler may want to purchase a bulk stock of these UIA's and can hold the products 'in inventory' without actually needing to have physical storage. They have the products on the books and can plan their physical stock requirements as needed.
Advertisers who see potential in the product could also buy bulk UIAs with the expectation that they will sell that UIA to a customer for a profit before the UIA has been redeemed for the physical item.
A brick and mortar store expecting to make a physical sale of a product in the near future could then swap the UIA for the product just days before they expect to make a sale and their warehousing requirements are kept as efficient as possible.
Could a system like this make the manufacturing industry as a whole more efficient?
Companies may even be able to insure themselves against a fire in their warehouse.
By purchasing UIAs of all their stock and then selling the UIA back to the market as they make physical sales. Perhaps there would be some way for a large warehousing company could 'make the market' for UIA products that they house and also provide insurance.
Due to the time required to deliver physical goods these systems could only work if UIAs were adopted at very local levels. Small businesses would need to be incentivized to issue UIAs of their stock and future product lines.
Does anyone else think this is something possible with User issued assets?