Sales dosen't reflect demand? Why is that?

[BMaker11]

Gnizmo said:

BMaker11 said:

They only use about 2000 respondents in presidential elections, and those numbers are pretty accurate within a *" "*/-2% margin of error

Edit: why won't a plus sign show up?

Random sampling always has the chance to be inaccurate. Just choosing 2000 people doesn't remotely guarantee that you get an accurate spread. You are just very likely. Laws of probability dictate that eventually you get a bum group. In your example eventually you get 2,000 hardcore partisans one way or the other and get a completely skewed result. The difference being it would be immediately obvious what happened and the results thrown out and try again. If the perceived demand does not match actual sales then the poll is obviously just wrong due to random sampling error.

I understand that. That's just how statistics work. Hell, even at the 100K level that was proposed, you *could* get 100K partisan people (not out of the question since these consoles sells 200K a week). 

But if I've learned anything from my statistics courses, anything above 2000 is asking too much. It takes too much time and effort (and money) to gather that many samples, and calculate accordingly. However, most of the time, at around 2000, it's damned accurate.

But, yes, I do understand that any time you do random sampling, there's the potential for random sampling error. Unless you can sample an entire population ("sample" isn't the correct word when referring to a population, I know) you will never always be automatically correct. But then again, those high are numbers are simply not feasible