It is easy to supply your store directly if you have a small operation. However when you have many farms, factories and stores the picture may look a little different. Warehouses helps in that it limits the number of relationships that you have to set up in a large network.
Farm 1 >
Farm 2 > <—> Factory 1
Farm 3 > Warehouse 1 <—> Factory 2
Farm 4 > ——> Store 1
Farm 5 > ——> Store 2
Farm 6 > ——> Store 3
in this case you only had to set up 13 relationships. If you has a direct supply chatn farms, factories, stores you would have 18 relationships to set up, and it gets exponentially higher the more units you have