[Mauldor]

I wish to tell you about a recent trip to the Shops and my lack of understanding on this subject :-

I wanted to Buy Battlefield 2 and Call of Duty : United Offensive
My Choice here is to Buy online or go out to the Shops and get the product then and there. Now I Understand that a Online retailers do not have as many Staff to carry out the task, no Shop + Electricity costs + Staff etc to manage and so forth.

The first port of call lets say is GAME Online - Now they had BF:2 for £27.99 - I went off to the Town to the SAME SHOP and they had the same game for £34.99. I question the person behind the counter and he said "we will price match" - Soon as I said "Online" he said we will not price match with anything Online - fair enough. I asked him why the same company (*GAME*) can charge cheaper online then it can it is shop - "they do not have Staff etc to pay - which is why they can do it cheaper then us" - But one second there - they do have to pay Staff, the people I am speaking to riht now.

My Next Point, Price matching then from same shop - what is the point of this? If I was to walk around town and find it cheaper, why would I then trudge back to that Shop and do this "Price Match" - surely I would just buy it from the Cheaper shop yes?

My Question / Observation is thus:
More and more People will shop Online, as they can get Items (not just computer stuff) a LOT cheaper online from the SAME SHOP then actually going out - driving to the shop and picking up the item. The End result I see of this is that Shops are not seen as making much Profit, Staff get Cut - less shops in the high street and so forth. In my Town alone I keep seeing shops (even big name chains) closing down the branches as less and less people are shopping there..

What can be done?
Why do they not Price match the Price online + P&P and add say £1 to the price, for the convenice of picking up the item there and then? Certain Items do not change much over time - I can fully underdtand say Dixons holding computer parts which they paid XXX for and now the price dropped drasticly - this is where Online Shops can get the better pricing but other things - such as my example with the Said Games do not cost anything different and in this example they lost out to a REAL shop - one around the cornor who were selling the same games £5 cheaper - much closer to the Online Price in fact.

Any thoughts on this?