There are two things that come to mind:

You're training program may suck

Currently employed people will be turned off by spending a week (unpaid) going through an "interview"

Some of us do not live in markets that Verizon serves. And Verizon is not rolling out any new fiber (I could be wrong).

For example, here in Rochester, NY the local phone company (Frontier) is no longer pushing Time Warner Cable to have better service. Frontier isn't rolling out any fiber as far as I know. It would be nice to have some competition. The cable bill goes up, yet I get the same service.

As I posted eariler....

"We want a 'JR Web Developer' with 3-5 years exp. in LAMP/HTML/CSS/Javascript/Photoshop. The pay is $11-15/hr"

There will be more loyalty if the company tries to create an environment to keep employees.

If you're going to treat your employees like dirt / easily replacable cogs in a machine, and give them 1.9% raises (if they are lucky), of course your employees will have no intention of being loyal. If someone comes along and gives your employees a 15% raise and better working conditions, of course they are going to leave. What else would you expect?

Two random thoughts I always have on these news stories.

First, anyone good won't be willing to work for peanuts (or will find your other employment terms unreasonable), may not be easy to find or will find the work they will be doing at your company unchallengling.

Secondly, if the claim that "good people are hard to find" is true, you'll need to maybe invest in some training. If you're scared of the ROI if they end up leaving - the answer to that is pay people a respectable wage and/or stop treating them like 3 year olds. This alone would keep people from working elsewhere, if they were treated well.

Simply saying that there is a shortage of technical people given the current state of unemployment/underemployment makes me cringe. Isn't there 50% unemployement of people coming out of college? You can't tell me all those kids suck and can't be tapped somehow?

But at some point you're going to have to bite the bullet and hire "average" workers and/or invest in some training and/or modify your compensation structure.

The best people I know in the field won't work for peanuts and many times "average" workers are "good enough" - i.e. you need someone to maintain your crusty old inventory system.

You couldn't be more incorrect.

If you have a problem with people leaving, the obvious problem is with your own company.

The obvious solution would be to keep your wages ahead of industry averages, as well as not keeping a hostile work environment. You shouldn't give your employees a reason to leave.

If I'm going to pay a premium for a laptop, I'd like to be able to upgrade the RAM and HDD. Or even replace the battery. Many users simply can't afford to buy the new model every year.

If this was an engineering marvel, Apple would have allowed users to do upgrades.