business

How fitting for a store that ran all the Mom&Pop shops into the ground.

It's the customer service that's broken. Everything else is a distraction. Listening to new leadership ramble on about financial discipline or demphasizing the big box, let's me know they will fail. Best Buy's issue is it's declining customer base caused by an increasing disregard for customers by Best Buy. The most telling moment came last holiday season when thousands of customers were left without gifts at Christmas when they had purchased them online before Thanksgiving. This was not about finance; it was not about their stores; it was about a level of apathy for customers that allowed them to sell products they didn't even have on the chance the product might arrive. That behavior is unthinkable at a customer first company. Then, like now, Best Buy was so focused on "strategic" issues that it forgot the hand that feeds it. All I hear from new management is more of the same.

This is all going to work great, until all the states or the federal government force Amazon to collect sales tax, eliminating the factor preventing Amazon from opening stores, and doing retail right, where the store is secondary to the Internet customer experience. The other thing Best Buy forgets is that a lot of customers migrating to online retailers aren't coming into their stores in the first place. The risk of ordering online is worth the convenience.

"Showrooming" is overblown. Very few people truly feel the need to go into a store to touch something before they purchase it online. Perhaps older demographics do, but young people certainly do not. This shows that Best Buy does not truly understand their problem. Their problem is that they are not competitive on price with online retailers, and that the shopping experience in their stores is poor and oppressive. Until they figure this out, nothing will change.

"A top priority, he said, is ending showrooming, the practice by customers of coming to stores only to look at merchandise that they buy from other retailers online." And how are they going to stop this??? Folks go to the store, see BB's high prices, find what they want and go home and order online. In this economy, our budgets are very tight and we have to shop around for the best price. BB has no true idea what the consumer wants or needs. Besides, why go into their store and put up with the high pressure sales people with little to no actual knowledge of what they are selling . . . . I have listened to a young man sell a computer to an elderly couple and got them to buy all the extra things they don't need. Vultures . . .

whatever it was they were doing in 1999, it worked for me. today, there is little in the stores compared to then, and it's all big pieces... none of the "glue" stuff like cables, adapters, oddities is there now. the guy answering the main phone is the one who does the online ordering for customers who deign to stay around the 20 minutes it takes for him to get a break in between calls and do what takes 4 minutes at home. this, along with rapacious vendors who think the customer should be ready and happy to dump everything and buy all new because we're using new plugs and don't make adapters every 6 years. epic industry FAIL.

So you Strib reporters, explain to me why Mr. Schulze needs to spend billions and billions to acquire 100% of BBY stock ("take the company private," as you say) in order to run the show again? How about acquiring 50.1% of the stock, or perhaps more, giving him board control? He already holds 20%... From viewing the BBY Annual Meeting online this morning, I heard every business cliche and every promise to shareholders I've ever heard in a CEO annual meeting presentation. (I know them, because I used them all myself in penning such speeches.) I hope their approach to their future business is more creative than how they talk about it! There is so much BBY could do to provide an viable alternative to online merchants. And I would much rather buy a product that might require service from an established brick-and-mortar merchant than a P.O. Box.

"Jobs" they cry yet take delight in lambasting the company that creates thousands of jobs in their home state... Perhaps the Strib should have written a piece on the generosity of Best Buy for providing gift cards to the 1/2 of 1 percent of those at holiday who were not able to receive their purchases (on top of refunding the full amount of each order). Until vendors start holding Amazon and other online retailers accountable for their race-to-the-bottom pricing, Best Buy simply can't compete on price with the amount of overhead it needs to account for.

Best Buy isn't the master of their fate. They're a gadget-driven business--they need something new to sell and drive traffic in to the store. Everybody that needed a digital TV got one when the switchover was made (no coincidence this was their last decent sales period). 3D TV was supposed to be the next "must have", but it bombed. Notebooks? Apple controls the margin on theirs and they're available everywhere, and in terms of dollars, the margin doesn't translate in to much. Plus there's little to sell with it in terms of accessories. Music? Itunes killed it. DVD Sales? Judging by the $5 discount bins, that's soon to be a victim of streaming services. Even the high-margin cables and accessories are on the way out. AppleTV? Well, maybe, if it ever comes out, but again, Apple controls the margin, and it'll be available everywhere for the same, manufacturer-set price. BestBuy Mobile stores? Why would I buy something at BestBuy that I can get at Verizon.com (heck, even Verizon's stores can't beat Verizon's on-line deals). I think we're on the second swirl around the bowl here.

All they need to do is follow a model like Microcenter is using: good or even fair prices, knowledgeable sales staff, and a decent selection of products. Best Buy has *none* of that right now, which is why they're slowly sinking.