I stop paying attention for just one night, and look what happens?
While browsing one of my e-mail accounts today I came across a rather worrisome notice: Home electronics superchain Best Buy bought out Speakeasy.net. Speakeasy is known for being a geek-friendly DSL provider - their tier-one tech support is extremely knowledgable, and if you know your stuff they'll listen to you and help you figure things out. Best Buy purchased them because Speakeasy has one of the better developed VoIP networks of any ISP in the US today, and they're always angling for another chunk of the market. The announced purchase price was $97mus. They claim that they're not going to be changing anything, but I'm holding my breath, just in case....
As if that wasn't enough... Bookstore mega-chain Borders took its Rewards programme out behind the chemical shed and shot it twice in the back of the head with a small calibre pistol. The way it used to work, if you dropped between $50us and $100us (I don't recall off the top of my head - can you tell that I should be in bed right now?) you'd get a Personal Shopping Day good for 30 calendar days, in which you'd get 20% off the final bill of every purchase you made in 24 hours.
On 12 April 2007 they'll discontinue that program in favour of giving shoppers with Borders Preferred Shopper tags what amounts to a $5us gift certificate the month after you drop $150us or more all at once. Of course, there's no cap on how many $5us gift certs you can earn...
They just shot themselves in the foot - those personal shopping days are what made them so popular, especially with techies buying books the way we do.