...Dusts off his tinfoil hat...

Does it strike anyone else as odd that these weird, mind boggling let's-drive-our-regular-customer's-open-wallets-to-other-sites "events" seem to happen JUST before a major sale is scheduled to start at their biggest competitor?

Once is accident, twice is coincidence, but three times is enemy action, quoth Flemming... I'm going to do some charitable accounting here and roll the death-to-prime and the ill-conceived site redesign/premature launch triple whammy into the same CRM nightmare, so by that count I guess there's one strike left before we can officially shout "Conspiracy!".

But seriously, now the staff starts a major controversy by worrying about some freebie hyperlinks leading to possible(!!!) lost sales? It seems to me that for a retail business the timing really couldn't be worse.