@Ian 16
>>"when a captive audience loses its captivity - change your business strategy. not the laws around it."
That might be what people in general might prefer happened, but the company seems to have found an easier way to keep the audience captive, or at least to stop other companies publicly undercutting them with their own products on a large scale.
Someone doing things on a smaller scale, shipping stuff to the EU for sale on street market stalls might be more likely to get away with it.
But then, I guess that kind of action might not only make a smaller dent on LS's profits due to the smaller size of operation, but might be rather less undermining to their expensively-bought image than having the jeans discounted in Tesco (or continental equivalents) and advertised as being sold cheap would be.
Even if I don't like the current setup, I can understand why they might see it not only as good for them, but even as arguably fair. After all, they're not actually stopping anyone /else/ making jeans and selling them for whatever price they want wherever they want to sell them, they're just trying to reap the rewards themselves that result from promoting their own brand in various places.
If I couldn't find retailers of grey products advertising openly but I could get cheap stuff down the local market, that'd seem like a fair kind of compromise, since people wouldn't be advertising in ways that actually risked undermining the manufacturer's own image-making while still effectively hoping to profit from it to some extent.