> which is sort of an odd business decision
It's probably no decision at all, but merely poor coordination between separate departments.
Once a bureaucracy surpasses a certain size, odd side effects accumulate on their own, and the growing number of people affected by them seek to cast blame where no purpose ever existed.
I felt compelled to reply to this because I agree with it so strongly (which is also why I phrased my initial post as "sort of odd" rather than "some evil anti-consumer monopoly volcano lair conspiracy"); so many corporate oddity theories are easily caused by dysfunction that I wonder how many of their proponents have ever really been exposed to a corporate job.