Which is made up of friends, family members and neighbors. Not random strangers far from your home.
I'd hardly call a fellow who runs a local store a random stranger far from home. He's part of the community, and for his actions to be commercially successful they need to reflect values which a significant part of that community shares.
And again, it matters a great deal whether it's being done by someone with monopoly status. If every game shop or bookstore starts playing nanny, that's a problem. If one does so in a crowded market, you're giving folks the choice of a destination aligned with their values.
I called you a liar because endorsing third parties that make arbitrary moral judgments on others is completely anti-ethical to everything liberal hippies stand for.
Being able to choose to do business with a game store that doesn't sell to children unless an adult vouches for their grades is every bit as valid as letting people choose to do business with hair salons that use only non-animal-tested products -- you're not arguing that that is morally corrupt, are you? The retailer doesn't have monopoly power in the relevant market, the consumer is explicitly choosing to do business with them anyhow... As long as other options are available, who are you to say it's wrong?
Yes, I endorse those values, but I'm also endorsing them in the context of a non-monopoly business for which a wide variety of alternate providers are available. This is one little guy trying to do something to make a positive difference in his community we're talking about here, not Big Corporate Management From On High (or state or federal government) doing something which impacts availability of games from every supplier available.
Then they can take five seconds to see what games their kid has in their Playstation. That's their job. Expecting other people to do that for them is pure laziness.
Hey -- it takes a village. Responsible parenting is easier if you're in a society which supports it -- though I absolutely don't believe that such support is the government's job. And folks who may or may not become responsible parents on their own are more likely to pick up good memes if they run into them elsewhere in society.
Use your head. The only reason most games are purchased by 18-40 year olds is because they have disposable income. Kids buy games. A lot of games.
They do? Where do they get the money?
As you say, 18-40 year olds are the people with disposable income. Parents and friends (via their parents, if said friends aren't adults themselves) buy kids games -- and, as I've said before, parents and family friends buying games for kids can make up for the loss of kids buying games for yourself if your store distinguishes itself sufficiently as to draw parents from geographic regions in which they would otherwise go to other stores. There's enough saturation in game shops that there's room for some market segmentation: Locations catering to adults and locations catering to direct sales to children.
Heck -- much of the time, kids don't even have their own transportation. If you're asking your parents to take you by the game store, there's a pretty good chance they'll prefer to go by the place with the manager who promotes responsible values. (I almost said "family values" -- but damn, that's an overused and co-opted phrase. Suffice to say that when I say "family values" I'm not talking about traditionalist one-mommy-one-daddy bullshit, but about actually raising children to be intelligent, compassionate and responsible adults).
Liar.
Not. What would it take to prove that to you? My 512-area-code home phone number? My receipt from buying The Audacity of Hope? Contact info for friends who can vouch for my social and political leanings?
Or are you simply unwilling to accept anything that contradicts your initial impressions?
Just curious -- any particular reason your wife hasn't tried NeoOffice? (Or have 'yall tried it and found that it didn't work out?)
Also, OOo is mostly C++ -- the java portions are actually in the minority.
Not quite sure how I parse the argument about flexibility making up for a performance difference, unless you're talking about reduced development cost compensating for increased hardware costs (which I can agree with, to a point). Most Java runtimes do at least some level of interpretation from bytecode to machine code. My experience thus far is that other than startup time (and when running code not written by a bonehead, which a great many Java developers are), modern Java (1.4+, using JRockit where appropriate) is actually a decent language with quite good runtime performance (for being garbage-collected and bytecode-based) but with a standard library written by a company that couldn't design a graphics API which is simultaneously usable (which Swing almost is, but AWT is not -- lowest-common-denominator for your widget selection sucks!) and performant (which AWT almost is, but Swing is not -- failing to take advantage of native widgets when they're available sucks!) to save their lives; ironically, the most unsucky Java-centric graphics library I know of is from the Eclipse project, SWT). For the most part, though, I've even gotten to the point of forgiving Sun for not providing an interface to the select() call in earlier versions -- and forgiveness for that takes some doing.
That said -- Java-the-language is certainly not built around flexibility (yes, you've got introspection, but it's much more out-of-your-way to use than in newer languages -- and the number of lines of code needed to get something done is frequently more than it should be), but it's not even remotely the only one targeting the JVM. I've had much fun with JVM-targeted Scheme implementations (Scheme's biggest weakness, after all, is the unstandardized and frequently useless runtime library), and really really wish Jython would get its legs back (which maybe it's doing -- I see they've finally gotten 2.2 out the door). (That said, the bytecode-targeted language I'm having the most fun with when I get playtime is Boo -- it borrows Python's good ideas, adds in several more of its own, but targets the.NET CLR and so is a little off-topic for this thread).
A bigger problem is Java developers being taught to do things in ways which are trendy but not performant -- such as using threading in cases where asynchronous calls from a smaller number of threads makes more sense. Part of this is because the language itself forced people to do things that way until it was improved (things like NIO being introduced), and part of this is because of people coming to Java without experience playing outside the JVM's sandbox and thus having a good idea of what's involved in terms of the work the JVM and OS and the hardware have to do to actually run the code they're writing...
...but anyhow, I've been rambling, and will stop now. Suffice to say that, though, that Java itself has its share of warts, but nonetheless has been at least somewhat unfairly maligned.
I wish i could still get my hands on some DDT - one treatment would keep my house safe for 10-20 years easily. Much better than the 2-5 year chemicals they use now with those retarded 'bait' traps.
I just had my house treated inside the last few months, and the fellow doing the inspection (who had obviously been in the business for quite some time) was saying that almost every chemical they use for pest control has been weakened over the last few decades, with the exception of Termidor -- which is, thus far, having its tested effective lifespan (already over 10 years) increased year-by-year as the early test samples continue to prove effective.
but I'd be willing to bet big money they don't have a policy allowing the store manager to REFUSE SALES based on any arbitrary rules he happens to think up
My question was not whether they have a policy allowing it, but whether they have a policy disallowing it. He's management, even if low-level -- and that should mean having the freedom to do things which you reasonably believe will benefit the portion of the company for which you are responsible, to the extent that those things are not disallowed.
It's only insubordination if he's been ordered not to (either directly or by established policy). You have a copy of the GameStop policy handbook (or any direct communications between this manager and his superiors) to prove your (implicit) allegation that one of these two things is true?
Further, his position is "store manager", not "button pusher". You know how some companies like to say that their employees are "empowered"? Well, this is it -- empowerment at work! Make a policy adjustment (presuming that neither established company policies regarding the breadth of your role nor any direct order from your superiors has indicated to the contrary) and if it works, it can be replicated elsewhere in the chain; if it doesn't work, you're out of a job. For the same reason that a nonzero mutation rate is healthy for a species, a nonzero rate of individual locations trying new things is healthy for a corporation.
Look. I bought a Wii for Christmas for my friends' kids, and I play my share of shooters (mostly of the plot-heavy single-player variety). I'm not some anti-game jackass, but at the same time that's no reason to think it's acceptable for people to let their kids play games when their grades suck. When I was raised, if your grades dropped below a B average, you lost the privileges to do anything but study. You pull your grades up? You get to go out and have fun.
It's not about video games, it's about encouraging responsible parenting. And while I certainly don't think it's the government's job to regulate peoples' parenting, a little bit of societal pressure here and there isn't necessarily a bad thing -- gets people to think a bit about what others consider socially acceptable behavior, if nothing else.
Now, would you please stop with the characterizations, and actually consider the argument? I'm not part of the take-away-all-yer-games bandwagon (being on that bandwagon is one of my big problems with Hillary, for that matter), and treating anyone whose position differs from yours in the least as if they're Satan himself doesn't do much good in terms of potential to come up with a society we can both live with.
I think this is good marketing to the concerned-parent crowd, and such a sound business move. Where the hell in my post was I trying to play on moral issues?
And I'm quite sure (albeit not a lawyer, can't give legal advice, don't know anything about your jurisdiction anyhow) that there isn't anything actionable here from a privacy perspective. We're not collecting info directly from the kids (which is mostly illegal only when done online anyhow), and what we are collecting is provided voluntarily by the parent or guardian for the explicit purpose for which it's used. No harm, no foul.
And other parents are going to be offended that the store manager wants them to waste their time to come in and say their kid can buy a game.
To the contrary -- parents who care so little about their childrens' academic performance as to see this as a waste of time are exactly the sort whose children won't be buying any games at his store without someone lying on their behalf. If we trust his figures, that's a happily small number.
He's doing something that he has no business doing and is costing his store money, just to make a few prudes happy.
What do you mean, "no business doing"? He's encouraging responsibility among his clientèle. Just like the bartender who refuses to continue to serve a customer who would prefer to give themselves alcohol poisoning, he's upholding the respectability of his business and (by encouraging his clients to make less self-destructive choices) increasing the chances of those clients being around and prosperous for a long time to come.
Further, it's by no means established that this results in a net loss of income. You may describe those who are concerned about children focusing on their studies as "a few prudes", but that's a bogus characterization. I'm a hippie liberal geek living in Left Texas (aka Austin), and I think this is a fantastic move. It's nothing against video games -- I'm anxiously awaiting a chance to upgrade my video hardware and play through Bioshock again -- and everything to do with encouraging parental and personal responsibility on a societal, rather than governmental, level. Point is, there are people who think this is a good move -- listen to the mainstream media rather than the blogosphere, and it's a lot of people. If that's the case, he stands to gain considerably more business than he's turning away.
If putting studies before video games is being a prude, I don't want to know how the next generation or two will turn out.
Good idea. Raise the stakes in order to save some cash. That's a strategy that will work every time...right up until it doesn't. It doesn't matter how tough you are. There's always somebody somewhere who's tougher and more desperate than you are.
Sure -- but the higher that bar gets raised, the fewer of those somebodies are left.
I'm living in Texas at the moment, and I'm quite glad that a significant number of my fellow homeowners are well-armed (and that local laws -- and juries -- are generally conducive to defensive use of deadly force). Making home invasion a risky business means that fewer are willing to try it, and those that do are more likely to meet an unfortunate end before they get around to my place. (I recall the police commenting on a 19-year-old who was caught robbing homes as to how lucky he was to still be alive).
So -- I may hand over my wallet (or I may not -- not specifying until it happens), but the more people there are who raise the stakes in self defense, the safer all of us are. It's thus a reasonable assertion that such an action is, in fact, the socially responsible thing to do.
Negative media coverage, if the posts here are any indication.
Blog coverage and mainstream media coverage are quite different things -- and the mainstream coverage has been consistently positive. Other GameStop locations can keep the bloggers -- sure, us technophiles are moderately numerous and have a nontrivial amount of spending power, but concerned parents have got us outnumbered by far.
Well, I'm trusting the local media on that one; they're closer to the ground than anyone else. (To a significant extent, too, the local media is what makes it popular within a community; they put a positive spin on it, hence people think about it in those terms, hence it's popular).
Maybe you're joking -- but not when I last took constitutional law, they weren't. Jeez, think of the lawsuits we'd have otherwise -- it'd be illegal to refuse to hire someone because they were stupid!
(I took all the law-related classes I could as part of my business minor, but IANAL).
Should thinking like that be rewarded? Sure, but you better not determine it worthwhile and enact it yourself without first checking with the people who's money you are playing with.
Why yes, that's right -- he should hold a referendum at the next shareholders meeting about whether his individual store should be allowed to implement a policy of asking parents to vouch for childrens' grades when selling games. And the fellow running the GameStop down the street should have a referendum about whether the 2%-off sale he's planning on holding next week should be allowed, as well.
Businesses make decisions all the time -- and 99% of the time, those decisions certainly aren't made directly by the people whose money is being played with. Instead, you've got a huge chain of delegated authority -- and some of that needs to reach down to the local and storefront level for a company to be reasonably agile.
Is a local manager taking an action which is clearly out of the realm of their authority? That's cause to remove them, certainly -- but unless we've got a copy the relevant policies (should such exist), neither of us has any idea whether any explicitly defined boundary has been crossed or not.
Mmm. Would need to see what GameStop's policies look like to argue this further. If they claim that their store managers are "empowered" (it's a shiny happy buzzword, after all!), then clamp down when onesuch manager does something with a great deal of potential to benefit the store he's running, then that's still objectionable.
If the GameStop manager can't call up J. Random Memorial High School and asks for Johnny's report card due to privacy issues then he shouldn't be asking John Sr. to vouch for Junior.
They're entirely different things, in that the latter is a voluntary transaction -- John Sr. needs to agree to provide the information; otherwise, it remains private.
That would still be questionable if the company requiring the information release had monopoly power within the relevant market -- but obviously, nothing of the sort is the case here.
There's a reason why a higher mutation rate (within reason) has a positive impact on the evolution of a species, even though a strong majority of them have a negative impact. Why? Because if you rely only on safe, incremental improvements, you don't get anywhere nearly as quickly as if you take localized risks (a small percentage of each generation being nonviable due to negative mutations, balanced against the potential for a positive mutation which then is able to spread). The folks back at HQ are indeed putting money into marketing -- but they're also potentially more risk-averse than the individual store managers. Central planning leaves an organization inflexible -- and relying strictly on HQ to come up with new ideas is indeed just such a beast.
The failure of an individual store doesn't risk GameStop's overall wellbeing. The success of a new model pioneered by an individual store may benefit the entire corporation. Presuming that store managers are adequately motivated to protect their careers (and, should they be franchisees, their investments), the benefits of allowing local experimentation within the small subset of locations managed by individuals with the motivation to affect such changes substantially outweigh the risks.
He just made customers go another block to the 'other of a million' game stores and buy there for the same competitive price.
Some customers. Other customers (like parents, who tend to be the people bankrolling Christmas and birthday gifts) are liable to appreciate the move quite a bit. If (for the sake of an argument) he loses 100% of his non-parent sales but gets 1% of the parents in the Dallas area to go to his store when they want to buy a game as a gift for a child, that's a massive win: When he was "just another game store", there was no reason for people to select his store over others (with comparable pricing and selection) other than location. Making a policy and getting publicity that makes his store stand out, on the other hand, means people might be willing to drive further to get there, and distinguishes him from the competition. From a business perspective, it's potentially a great move.
He also took away a pretty basic freedom / right from all of his younger customers.
Beg your pardon? There's no right to be sold video games. If he were discriminating on the basis of being part of a protected class (age/race/disability/etc), that would be one thing -- but it's not the case here. Deciding you don't want your store to serve children with poor grades until they shape up is perfectly legitimate.
It's legitimate for a local branch of a business to do spend money doing good within its community as part of a promotional effort -- donating funds and/or employees' time to libraries and schools and such. How is establishing a policy of refusing to sell games to poor students any different? It gets publicity for the store, and has potential to increase sales in the long run -- not to mention an opportunity to garner a reputation as being a good citizen in the community.
Certainly, the manager is responsible for his branch's profitability. As long as he's meeting that goal, what's to criticize?
Slashdot Mirror
Sure you want to get into that battle?
And again, it matters a great deal whether it's being done by someone with monopoly status. If every game shop or bookstore starts playing nanny, that's a problem. If one does so in a crowded market, you're giving folks the choice of a destination aligned with their values.Being able to choose to do business with a game store that doesn't sell to children unless an adult vouches for their grades is every bit as valid as letting people choose to do business with hair salons that use only non-animal-tested products -- you're not arguing that that is morally corrupt, are you? The retailer doesn't have monopoly power in the relevant market, the consumer is explicitly choosing to do business with them anyhow... As long as other options are available, who are you to say it's wrong?
Yes, I endorse those values, but I'm also endorsing them in the context of a non-monopoly business for which a wide variety of alternate providers are available. This is one little guy trying to do something to make a positive difference in his community we're talking about here, not Big Corporate Management From On High (or state or federal government) doing something which impacts availability of games from every supplier available.
As you say, 18-40 year olds are the people with disposable income. Parents and friends (via their parents, if said friends aren't adults themselves) buy kids games -- and, as I've said before, parents and family friends buying games for kids can make up for the loss of kids buying games for yourself if your store distinguishes itself sufficiently as to draw parents from geographic regions in which they would otherwise go to other stores. There's enough saturation in game shops that there's room for some market segmentation: Locations catering to adults and locations catering to direct sales to children.
Heck -- much of the time, kids don't even have their own transportation. If you're asking your parents to take you by the game store, there's a pretty good chance they'll prefer to go by the place with the manager who promotes responsible values. (I almost said "family values" -- but damn, that's an overused and co-opted phrase. Suffice to say that when I say "family values" I'm not talking about traditionalist one-mommy-one-daddy bullshit, but about actually raising children to be intelligent, compassionate and responsible adults).Not. What would it take to prove that to you? My 512-area-code home phone number? My receipt from buying The Audacity of Hope? Contact info for friends who can vouch for my social and political leanings?
Or are you simply unwilling to accept anything that contradicts your initial impressions?
Just curious -- any particular reason your wife hasn't tried NeoOffice? (Or have 'yall tried it and found that it didn't work out?)
.NET CLR and so is a little off-topic for this thread).
...but anyhow, I've been rambling, and will stop now. Suffice to say that, though, that Java itself has its share of warts, but nonetheless has been at least somewhat unfairly maligned.
Also, OOo is mostly C++ -- the java portions are actually in the minority.
Not quite sure how I parse the argument about flexibility making up for a performance difference, unless you're talking about reduced development cost compensating for increased hardware costs (which I can agree with, to a point). Most Java runtimes do at least some level of interpretation from bytecode to machine code. My experience thus far is that other than startup time (and when running code not written by a bonehead, which a great many Java developers are), modern Java (1.4+, using JRockit where appropriate) is actually a decent language with quite good runtime performance (for being garbage-collected and bytecode-based) but with a standard library written by a company that couldn't design a graphics API which is simultaneously usable (which Swing almost is, but AWT is not -- lowest-common-denominator for your widget selection sucks!) and performant (which AWT almost is, but Swing is not -- failing to take advantage of native widgets when they're available sucks!) to save their lives; ironically, the most unsucky Java-centric graphics library I know of is from the Eclipse project, SWT). For the most part, though, I've even gotten to the point of forgiving Sun for not providing an interface to the select() call in earlier versions -- and forgiveness for that takes some doing.
That said -- Java-the-language is certainly not built around flexibility (yes, you've got introspection, but it's much more out-of-your-way to use than in newer languages -- and the number of lines of code needed to get something done is frequently more than it should be), but it's not even remotely the only one targeting the JVM. I've had much fun with JVM-targeted Scheme implementations (Scheme's biggest weakness, after all, is the unstandardized and frequently useless runtime library), and really really wish Jython would get its legs back (which maybe it's doing -- I see they've finally gotten 2.2 out the door). (That said, the bytecode-targeted language I'm having the most fun with when I get playtime is Boo -- it borrows Python's good ideas, adds in several more of its own, but targets the
A bigger problem is Java developers being taught to do things in ways which are trendy but not performant -- such as using threading in cases where asynchronous calls from a smaller number of threads makes more sense. Part of this is because the language itself forced people to do things that way until it was improved (things like NIO being introduced), and part of this is because of people coming to Java without experience playing outside the JVM's sandbox and thus having a good idea of what's involved in terms of the work the JVM and OS and the hardware have to do to actually run the code they're writing...
It's only insubordination if he's been ordered not to (either directly or by established policy). You have a copy of the GameStop policy handbook (or any direct communications between this manager and his superiors) to prove your (implicit) allegation that one of these two things is true?
Further, his position is "store manager", not "button pusher". You know how some companies like to say that their employees are "empowered"? Well, this is it -- empowerment at work! Make a policy adjustment (presuming that neither established company policies regarding the breadth of your role nor any direct order from your superiors has indicated to the contrary) and if it works, it can be replicated elsewhere in the chain; if it doesn't work, you're out of a job. For the same reason that a nonzero mutation rate is healthy for a species, a nonzero rate of individual locations trying new things is healthy for a corporation.
Waitamoment. You're comparing me to that asshole?
Bull-fucking-shit.
Look. I bought a Wii for Christmas for my friends' kids, and I play my share of shooters (mostly of the plot-heavy single-player variety). I'm not some anti-game jackass, but at the same time that's no reason to think it's acceptable for people to let their kids play games when their grades suck. When I was raised, if your grades dropped below a B average, you lost the privileges to do anything but study. You pull your grades up? You get to go out and have fun.
It's not about video games, it's about encouraging responsible parenting. And while I certainly don't think it's the government's job to regulate peoples' parenting, a little bit of societal pressure here and there isn't necessarily a bad thing -- gets people to think a bit about what others consider socially acceptable behavior, if nothing else.
Now, would you please stop with the characterizations, and actually consider the argument? I'm not part of the take-away-all-yer-games bandwagon (being on that bandwagon is one of my big problems with Hillary, for that matter), and treating anyone whose position differs from yours in the least as if they're Satan himself doesn't do much good in terms of potential to come up with a society we can both live with.
I think this is good marketing to the concerned-parent crowd, and such a sound business move. Where the hell in my post was I trying to play on moral issues?
And I'm quite sure (albeit not a lawyer, can't give legal advice, don't know anything about your jurisdiction anyhow) that there isn't anything actionable here from a privacy perspective. We're not collecting info directly from the kids (which is mostly illegal only when done online anyhow), and what we are collecting is provided voluntarily by the parent or guardian for the explicit purpose for which it's used. No harm, no foul.
Further, it's by no means established that this results in a net loss of income. You may describe those who are concerned about children focusing on their studies as "a few prudes", but that's a bogus characterization. I'm a hippie liberal geek living in Left Texas (aka Austin), and I think this is a fantastic move. It's nothing against video games -- I'm anxiously awaiting a chance to upgrade my video hardware and play through Bioshock again -- and everything to do with encouraging parental and personal responsibility on a societal, rather than governmental, level. Point is, there are people who think this is a good move -- listen to the mainstream media rather than the blogosphere, and it's a lot of people. If that's the case, he stands to gain considerably more business than he's turning away.
If putting studies before video games is being a prude, I don't want to know how the next generation or two will turn out.
No, no, you phrased that wrong. It's a store where they sell ways to keep the kids occupied for a while.
I'm living in Texas at the moment, and I'm quite glad that a significant number of my fellow homeowners are well-armed (and that local laws -- and juries -- are generally conducive to defensive use of deadly force). Making home invasion a risky business means that fewer are willing to try it, and those that do are more likely to meet an unfortunate end before they get around to my place. (I recall the police commenting on a 19-year-old who was caught robbing homes as to how lucky he was to still be alive).
So -- I may hand over my wallet (or I may not -- not specifying until it happens), but the more people there are who raise the stakes in self defense, the safer all of us are. It's thus a reasonable assertion that such an action is, in fact, the socially responsible thing to do.
Well, I'm trusting the local media on that one; they're closer to the ground than anyone else. (To a significant extent, too, the local media is what makes it popular within a community; they put a positive spin on it, hence people think about it in those terms, hence it's popular).
Maybe you're joking -- but not when I last took constitutional law, they weren't. Jeez, think of the lawsuits we'd have otherwise -- it'd be illegal to refuse to hire someone because they were stupid!
(I took all the law-related classes I could as part of my business minor, but IANAL).
Businesses make decisions all the time -- and 99% of the time, those decisions certainly aren't made directly by the people whose money is being played with. Instead, you've got a huge chain of delegated authority -- and some of that needs to reach down to the local and storefront level for a company to be reasonably agile.
Is a local manager taking an action which is clearly out of the realm of their authority? That's cause to remove them, certainly -- but unless we've got a copy the relevant policies (should such exist), neither of us has any idea whether any explicitly defined boundary has been crossed or not.
Restraint of trade applies to contractual restrictions on parties with whom one can do business; this is nothing of the sort.
Mmm. Would need to see what GameStop's policies look like to argue this further. If they claim that their store managers are "empowered" (it's a shiny happy buzzword, after all!), then clamp down when onesuch manager does something with a great deal of potential to benefit the store he's running, then that's still objectionable.
That would still be questionable if the company requiring the information release had monopoly power within the relevant market -- but obviously, nothing of the sort is the case here.
There's a reason why a higher mutation rate (within reason) has a positive impact on the evolution of a species, even though a strong majority of them have a negative impact. Why? Because if you rely only on safe, incremental improvements, you don't get anywhere nearly as quickly as if you take localized risks (a small percentage of each generation being nonviable due to negative mutations, balanced against the potential for a positive mutation which then is able to spread). The folks back at HQ are indeed putting money into marketing -- but they're also potentially more risk-averse than the individual store managers. Central planning leaves an organization inflexible -- and relying strictly on HQ to come up with new ideas is indeed just such a beast.
The failure of an individual store doesn't risk GameStop's overall wellbeing. The success of a new model pioneered by an individual store may benefit the entire corporation. Presuming that store managers are adequately motivated to protect their careers (and, should they be franchisees, their investments), the benefits of allowing local experimentation within the small subset of locations managed by individuals with the motivation to affect such changes substantially outweigh the risks.
The story is that a policy that's popular within the community where it was implemented was terminated with prejudice by upper management.
It doesn't have to be a legal or ethical violation to be news.
How is this "abuse"?
It's legitimate for a local branch of a business to do spend money doing good within its community as part of a promotional effort -- donating funds and/or employees' time to libraries and schools and such. How is establishing a policy of refusing to sell games to poor students any different? It gets publicity for the store, and has potential to increase sales in the long run -- not to mention an opportunity to garner a reputation as being a good citizen in the community.
Certainly, the manager is responsible for his branch's profitability. As long as he's meeting that goal, what's to criticize?