I think their plan sounds good, especially the employer compensation bit. BB's worst problem is their clueless employees. Whenever I go there, either I can't find anyone or else I get surprised looks to basic questions. They seemed bored, etc. I think BB execs should take a stroll to the Apple store and look at the customer-employee interaction there.
If there is sufficient consumer demand for it, another solution will show up.
I find the markup on cables at BB to be very frustrating. Why can I get a cable shipped all the way across the country for less than 1/8th the price of a BB cable?
Best Buy can sell products or services. They obviously cant sell products (for a profit), and their services kind of suck. But they need to do one or the other, and they need to do it great. Amazon and company has them beat on selling products. They need to focus all their energy on selling services.
Best Buy's current strategy is borrowed time. A shame the employees get to suffer through shitty (mis)management like this.
Edit: GeekSquad and warranties are the other profit makers
Now it's just a dirty pile of what's left from last Christmas and display units that are un-powered or broken.
Don't get me started on their staff.
I really like the Sears model. My hometown wasn't big enough to have its own Sears store, but they had a catalog front-end, where they stocked one unit of their best selling products so people could see them in person. If you liked it, they would order one to be shipped to you or to their store, and you could pick it up. We need tech stores like this, an Amazon front-end.
I'm all rose-coloured glasses and nostalgia when it comes to dying brick-and-mortar stores, but let's not pretend that Best Buy isn't a silly place.
"Roughly 5-7 years ago Best Buy was competing with another company called.. Circuit City. One of the ways they were making sure they kept market share was whenever Circuit City was putting in a bid to open a store somewhere, Best Buy would bid higher and put a store in that exact same location. This caused Best Buy to open a lot of stores that were close to other Best Buy's (roughly 3-6 miles in some cases), but they just wanted to make sure Circuit City didn't get market share.
Fast forward to now, the leases on those stores ending and Best Buy is not renewing them. The store isn't very profitable as it could be because there is another one not too far down the road.
What that article also fails to mention is Best Buy is also going to open an additional 100 stores, two different types (Mobile stores in malls and community stores in smaller markets). Both of these types of stores are much smaller, cost less to run but typically are very profitable due to cell phone sales.
Am I a Best Buy employee? Obviously yes. Do I speak for the company? Nope. Do I plan on working here the rest of my life? Of course not. Just trying to be a bit more accurate than the chicken little the sky is falling that is mentioned in this article is all."
http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/rj92n/the_slow_d...
Had to wait 10 minutes for service because one employee was selling the other employee an ipad.
When I finally got an employee's attention, they didn't have my part (a USB->SATA adapter), they acted like I was inconveniencing them, and I noticed for parts they did have they were charging a ridiculous amount. Standard 3-prong power cable for more than $25 ridiculous.
They have some intrinsic advantages to the web store (real salespeople interaction, physical handling of goods) but with the net experience being so negative they are not leveraging these advantages well enough to compete with the speed and ease of online shopping.
1. You can get your stuff RIGHT NOW 2. You supposedly can get customized help/advice
What can other companies do to hasten Best Buy's death? Amazon seems to be piecing together a distribution network for same day/next day delivery in dense urban markets (at least, as a Prime member shipping to Chicago, I was offered some sort of courier delivery for $4). Perhaps Walgreens, etc. could up their game and offer an intelligently stocked selection of need-it-now things like cables? They're open 24/7 in most markets and could probably deal with "only" a 100% mark-up. Certainly, the immediacy of purchasing a TV from Best Buy is important to some, but I suspect small accessories account for the majority of purchases which, if a day's lag time had not been an issue, would have been made online instead.
The help/advice need seems like a more interesting niche for start-ups. Hunch.com seems like the right sort of idea if applied to Amazon's offerings. Let's say my friend suggests that we do a Skype video chat. While I personally can read through product specifications, know various companies' reputations for providing driver support over time, etc., my parents would be lost. A good salesperson asks questions about a customer's needs which help filter down a huge set of potential products down to just a few. Imagine paying a trusted, independent, and knowledgeable person $10 for a ten minute chat along with an interactive Amazon browsing session. People like my parents would be delighted. Heck, I'd use such a service if I was shopping for, say, a kitchen faucet.
What else can be done?
With Best Buy, you have to go get in your car, drive 7 miles to the store, browse for 20 minutes to find what you are looking for, then drive 7 miles back. So on top of $4 you probably spend on gas, you end up wasting an hour of your day just to get something.
With Amazon, you get the itch to get something, do a quick search, add it to the cart, and get it shipped + you can read reviews to find out if the item sucks.
And of course Amazon will tend to have lower prices...and with Prime, you'll have it very quick.
The only thing you'd go to Best Buy for, is if you have an emergency, and need something asap...and there aren't a lot of items that you can't wait a day for to avoid wasting an hour at the store
