This is something I’ve thought about on and off for many years — about how retail stores essentially killed themselves. It wasn’t Amazon. It wasn’t NewEgg. It was all them, shooting themselves in the foot and then stabbing themselves in the heart.

Typical retail experience is miserable, with indifferent, clueless salespeople with no knowledge pushing products and worthless “warranties” you don’t need, while the store itself has a very limited selection, an atrocious accompanying website and an experience no better than just buying it from Amazon and hoping for the best.

Did it have to be this way? Of course not. But the death of retail is what happens when you have the might-as-well-be human clones with the same MBAs from the same 10 schools running most retailers, all who have no cognitive ability to deviate from the course set by what everyone knows is true — but is as usual wrong.

It’s more complex than this, of course, and I won’t get to the bottom of it in a 200-word blog post.

Essentially, though, retailers chose a bad course, and when it was obvious they’d have to navigate between Scylla and Charybdis, some chose to tack directly for the whirlpool and some chose the sea monster, while declaring in unison, “We had no choice!”

But they always had a choice.