It's buried deep in the article, but what made PC Connection amazing was the shipping.
You could phone call a human in the wee hours of the morning, and have it show up later that same day. Or pay only a little and have it into two days. Compared to every other mail-order retailer in the universe at the time, it was insane, to have such selection and speed.
Yeah, apparently the warehouse which made this workable was in Kingston, Tenn. adjacent to the FedEx Hub, so things could go straight to the plane which was taking them to the FedEx distributor closest to the delivery address.
Still have the Wacom ArtZ I bought from them in the wee hours of a Monday morning when I decided I desperately had to have one.