After my last experience at Best Buy I vowed to never return, so a rapid decline for them comes as no surprise to me.

"But critics are pounding Best Buy for even small steps that seem common-sense positive, like selling a Best Buy house brand of tablet computer." ---- We shall call it the wheel but its full name will be the Best Buy wheel. Yeah, that will impress them. During this stupifying distraction, let all aboard know that their golden parachutes should be readied.

BBY has had ample oppotunity to diversify and expand into other areas of retailing, etc. It may be too late now. The City of Richfields city council may want to start thinking about what they are going to do if or when one of their largest property tax payers may not be around. Ouch! >_<

As soon as they stop selling 24" HDMI cables for $49.99, let me know...they may finally be getting a clue. When they stop the cable rip-offs, I'll go back into their stores.

It's all about price, baby! Walmart has identical item for less. Why the heck should I pay more at bestbuy? It all comes from china anyway? And joly got a $10M sign on bonus to figure this out??? Consumers do not care about anything but price right now.

“Let's call those 85 votes in favor,” on the Facebook page for Insignia, “a very hopeful sign.” A hopeful sign of what? A hopeful sign for whom? About “the unremittingly negative talk about Best Buy of late,” piling on? I would have loved to have the columnist indicated why there is the possibility that Dick Schulze may succeed in a quest to take Best Buy private, where there has been recent Minnesota law that would bar such a move – unless that law was changed in 2012. Why would someone invest their money in a company like this? This piece fails to put into some context whether the box store is going to survive in the information age? When leadership was pre-occupied elsewhere, with lost perspective of the world due to inappropriate relationship, and Brian Dunn was Dick Schulze's guy, why any cheerleading that Dick Schulze may succeed in taking Best Buy private? Will he bring back his sold team? So even if “the reality is we're going to sell millions of tablets this year," will Best Buy make a profit? The issue is the old business model and whether, after overhead, products can be sold at a profit. If we live in bearish times, why the cheerleading – “there is another case to be made as well, and if not exactly bullish at least it is something other than apocalyptic” – for a time gone by? Lee Schafer sounds here a lot more like Sid Hartman after last night's loss to Tampa Bay.

zzfan3 states ... "After my last experience at Best Buy I vowed to never return, so a rapid decline for them comes as no surprise to me". Response ... Yes zzfan3 ... now that you are no longer a BestBuy shopper, I am selling my remaining BB stock in anticipation of a "rapid decline" in company valuation resulting from your personal shopping decision. It is all about you.

I think you hit the nail on the head, but missed the point here, Lee. "Without a doubt, they argued, Best Buy would lose money selling a bland product in an acutely competitive niche, while alienating key Best Buy suppliers at the same time. Another sign of a company that's lost its way completely." They *are* alienating key suppliers and in no way should think they are capable of entering this market. The company is doomed unless they can fulfill the service need from folks who buy these complex products but can't set them up in their own homes. Until then, it is more interesting to read about chicken. mmmm, chicken... http://www.startribune.com/business/176051921.html Dermatrend that you thought so too... -SamIam

"In fact, it is hard to see how selling a private-label tablet has much to do with whether Best Buy succeeds over the next decade."

Introducing their own me-too tablet is exactly what's wrong with Best Buy these days. There is nothing compelling about the Flex. If they could sell it for $149 or even $199 there would be something distinctive about the product. But as it is, it will be buried in a sea of Android tablets being sold by bigger brand names and, likely, other brands using the same specs and Chinese assembler that Best Buy is using.

As with their $49 HDMI cables and their $39 Rocketfish cases, Best Buy does not seem to understand that their own brands do not carry the cachet of the big boys in the market. Nobody aspires to Best Buy.

And any organization that is even thinking about returning to the management team that brought them to their knees obviously is not thinking clearly. A Schulze buyout may be good for shareholders short-term. But it will kill Best Buy in the long run. smh.

This is the first somewhat positive article in the strib about bby in a long time, and is actually fair. Unfortunately you still get the negative comments from people with little knowledge outside of zero analysis financial opinion that they read in blogosphere sites like the motley fool. Sorry to break your hearts, bby isn't going anywhere. If bby is offering 25k of the low end insignia tablet, that is an avg of perhaps 20 per store, the delusional rants on something competitors don't even compete in for 20 units per store are embarrassing. Unfortunately the internet is filled with negative biased trolls, looking to spew their hate for 15 minutes of anonymous fame. Shouldn't you all be commenting on how Frazier should be fired this week? As for the walmart commentator....I can just say wow.