Merchant Organisation "Not Doing it Right" - news at 11

[Cartollomew]

http://www.pcworld.com/article/154734/v ... k=rss_news

1 Our sales are down for bricks and mortar stores!
2 Must be those filthy customers stealing product!
3 We're losing money! Think quick!
4 Develop a time consuming and unnecessary point of sale system for activating media! Pour money into research and development! Make sure it's too expensive for users to buy something similar!
5 Shit, that cost a lot. Raise the price of the games people buy from us to recoup losses!
6 Go to 1!

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Gee, your sales are down, huh? And we're coming into an economic slowdown which has so far done lots of damage to retail stores?
300 million in lost sales in 2007 - do you really think that's attributable to in-store theft?

Do any of these people bother to find out actual information before spending money and making stupid statements, or is it just knee-jerk reactions all the way?

We've got a publishing industry QQing about content theft via P2P, and then implementing expensive and ineffective copy protection that pisses off end users more than pirates and downloaders, a retail industry complaining that their unpopularity actually has more to do with physical theft than to do with a cost-ineffective distribution method of what are essentially boxes of air and a thriving online retail industry using highly cost effective distribution methods and offering actual additional value to customers, laughing all the way to the bank.

Am I the only one able to join the dots here?

Confidential to retailers:
Think, McFly, think!