http://money.cnn.com/2011/03/28/technology/thebuzz/index.htm

This article focuses on Best Buy and their downturn in sales. I'm not a fan of Best Buy, and I actually worked there and hated it a long time ago, but as stores go... they're okay.

The specific thing in CNN article that piqued my ire is this:

Simply put, Best Buy isn't benefiting from all the cool, innovative devices out there. It's facing brutal competition from mass merchandise retailers like Wal-Mart (WMT, Fortune 500) and Target (TGT, Fortune 500) as well as online kingpin Amazon (AMZN, Fortune 500).

Okay... Best Buy faces competition. The marketplace is at work.

But damnit, it shouldn't face it from Wal-Mart... and that is 50% consumers fault and 50% Best Buy.

I buy a lot from New Egg, primarily in the PC market, because I'm savvy and I know what I'm buying. But I like having a store where I can get information about big ticket items that help me make informed choices about things like big screen HDTVs and major appliances.

Now Best Buy should be that store... and many clerks I know at several locations try their best to be informed and helpful, but Best Buy fails to properly train their people and is too concerned with add-on sales and service plans.

But folks... Wal Mart is not an alternative. Wal Mart (and Target, etc.,) is where we go for laundry soap or boxer shorts or any of a million dumb things that we all can buy without any help. Big ticket electronics is an area where we should help Wal mart fail. They cannot, will not, add any value to that purchase in terms of knowledge or service.

Best Buy should succeed or fail against competitors than can offer better or worse service in the electronics and appliance sector (and Lowes and Home Depot do compete well in appliances) but they shouldn't get touched by overgrown flea markets like Wal Mart.

I've long wanted Best Buy to face serious competition, but if they lose to Wal Mart (etc.,) then in the long run the real losers will be millions of consumers.

What do you think?

Amazon for video games + Target for household supplies + Grocery store = what is Walmart?

I don't go to Best Buy either though. I get all my DVDs, BDs and video games from amazon and there really isn't much reason to go to Best Buy after that. I guess if I wanted a new HDTV I would check there.

I agree with HoneyBakedHam. I want Best Buy or some other electronic store to be knowledgeable about their products. You'll find a few employees who know their stuff, but they usually move on to something else. I'm not exactly a PC guru so I found it a bit ridiculous that I knew more about the routers I was interested in than the people in the Best Buy PC department.

I don't want Wal Mart to be the leading supplier of electronics. A lot of the hardware they sell breaks after a year.

I think back to my first HDTV purchase and the clueless-ness of the BB people, how even the Sears salesmen knew stuff better, how BB tries to push Monster cables, and how I bought a much better HDTV from Walmart for 600 dollars less. The Walmart folks brought out the manual when I asked so I could verify it had a QAM tuner that I could use. BB folks didn't know what QAM was.

I fail to shed a tear for BB. When they first opened in my area, they were the place to buy DVDs, no one was cheaper (this crap was new back then), now outside Black Friday and equivalent sales days they are a complete ripoff and fail to have much worthwhile.

Here's my favorite story, if you still care about this crap store. I do go to BB every once in awhile. You see, out front they have all those Rocket Fish Cat 5e and Cat 6 cables, 6 feet -12 feet, between 18 and 40 dollars. Clear in the back, near nothing else like it, they stock a 50 foot Rocket Fish Cat 6 cable for 20 bucks. Same brand, way longer, way cheaper.

Oh and having some hulking, fat dude pester to see in my bags is a big no-no, I will refuse and avoid your store as much as possible thereafter.

Walmart will be Best Buy competition until Best Buy sees fit to shape up. I think Walmart might actually treat their employees better, and that's saying something.

Everything I've seen at Best Buy has been marked up higher than retail.

If they're going bankrupt, it's their own goddamn fault.

They're nearly the only store that sells cable modems for a reasonable price locally. BB's prices are crap and most of their stuff actually isn't any higher quality than what Walmart sells, they just have a nicer looking store.

Yes. You are right. Maybe not so much about Wal mart treating their employees better, but that's a stiff competition.

CompUSA mismanaged themselves into oblivion and TigerDirect bought the CompUSA name because apparently they couldn't smell the putrid stench soaked through it.

CircuitCity, where they claimed "service is state of the art" bombed when they decided higher prices, less selection, and clueless staff was better than what they were doing prior to the 2002 restructuring... it just took a few years to finally lay them to rest.

Fry's is a terrible fucking disaster, but since there are fewer Fry's stores than states in the union (is that still true) and most of them are concentrated in one state, they are hardly a competitor anyway... even though I'd shop there if one were near me because you can actually buy PC parts there.

TigerDirect actually has fewer outlets than that.

MicroCenter is okay... but again with almost no retail presence.

Best Buy could, if they wanted to, become a meaningful location. And they should. But I don't think they will... and the idea of a Wal Mart Universe makes me cry like a little girl.

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Oh, and, yeah... anyone paying more than $10 on average for HDMI cables is getting shafted.

So Best Buy, a store which isn't competitive on prices, has crappy service, and no shortage of schemes to try to screw over their customers, is finding that this strategy isn't working too well? About damn time.

When you've got the Great Wal Mart of China running across your country it's not surprising that some businesses are going to find it impassable.

We have the same thing in Norway now. It's called a hypermarket. I don't really think it's modelled off of Walmart per se, but the story behind them is interesting nonetheless.

Basically, at one point they were just another grocery store at the shopping mall. Then they were two stores, they added a sports equipment store. Then they added electronics. Then furniture. Then building materials. Then they figured that hey, we've got like 7 stores spread all across here, let's just buy half the fucking floor space in this mall and gather it all together.

Lo and behold, the first "hypermarket" was born. This is also about the time when they started treating their employees (primarily), and secondarily their customers like dog food. I know because I've worked at one of these places. Minimum wage? Check. Even the store managers earned crap, a button and a half. And even though we actually have something called employee rights, so they can't fuck us up the tailpipe in quite the way you can in the US, that didn't stop them from using borderline illegal contracts, skipping on overtime pay, and generally trying to cheat us out of just a little money each month. I worked there for a year, and I think I had a grand total of two paychecks in that time that I didn't have to approach the boss with to complain about my logged hours mysteriously disappearing. And everyone had it like this, it was basically policy because they know that even when people get fed up and leave, there's always someone else in the applicant queue to fill the gap. The net result is that nobody in the stores know fuck shit about the products, which irritates customers, but the customers gravitate back anyway because you're the cheapest around by a landslide.

Then, one hypermarket wasn't enough so they bought up a huge swath of parking lot somewhere and constructed an even hyperer market at the other edge of town. The another in another town.

I mean, it's the classic Walmart story, only it's developed completely independently of Walmart.

And the funniest thing of all is that I've now started shopping there. Yup. It's exactly like that south park episode. I don't want to shop there, I want to support the lesser and more local stores, I want to support fresh produce, I want to support the actual game stores that have like three employees total but are passionate about games and all, even if the prices are a wee bit higher... but ... oh my god, the deals. The prices. Buy 3 pizzas and get a bottle of coke free! Act now and get a 20% discount on your initial purchase of super floormop tripack! Special deal today: 2 kgs of chicken breast for fucking $24.99, that's two weeks of dinner if I stretch them a bit.

Complain all you want, Walmart is a runaway success as a business model because people are just that damn greedy.

Boutique shops are better and people would buy there, if any still existed. There are no mom and pop video game stores, they are all Gamestop. Hell, Gamestop even gobbled up EB, they gobble up everything. I shop at Walmart because they still bother to stock crap I need, like basic household cleaners. Fragrance free products can hardly be found these days, but they can be at Walmart. You can get a gallon of Hydrogen Peroxide for 88 cents there, a pint will cost over 2 bucks anywhere else.

Ant bait... I can pay 2 bucks at Walmart or six bucks at Home Depot... hmm, super big chain versus really expensive super big chain, which to choose...

FWIW I do support the chains that are actually better, we have one auto parts chain around here that does a good job and has helpful staff, I drive 5 extra miles to buy their parts. I can't justify paying 3 times as much to buy oil there but if they are halfway close on something like spark plugs or whatever else I need, I'll get it there.

Walmart does deserve some criticism for how they do business. My real gripe is how come they get the black eye when you have Costco, Target, Sears, and all the others doing the exact same crap?

I'll say one other thing, when I go to inner city Walmarts I see one thing, poor people. It's easy to mock a soccer mom for shopping there just because she's greedy and cheap, I have a hard time mocking some 40 year old gal who works the fryer across the street and makes minimum wage with no benefits for trying to stretch the little they have.

I agree with the miss information in BB. My cousin went to buy a pc and asked about them. Whet they answered was the specs that were written on it. I also once went and asked about wacom drawing tablets and they sent me to the area where the ipad was.....

First off: PC's at Best Buy are a scam. Laptops and netbooks especially. They typically have older hardware or less features than their standard counterparts. At least the Asus models did, and were noticeably different than ones at Newegg or Fry's.

Second: Geek squad is a joke. Also, google around for some of the lawsuits and controversies that have arisen due to their techs getting a little too snoopy in customers computers.

I actually do a fair bit of shopping at Best Buy. I bought a 46-inch LED TV there about a year ago, and more recently, in 2011, I bought Mass Effect 2 (PS3), Total War: Shogun 2 (PC), and TurboTax Deluxe (PC, obviously). I am sure I bought a couple other games there in 2010 that I have forgotten. However, I do my homework and only by the items that are fairly priced; the TV was during a sale, and new software prices (within the first few weeks of release) is pretty standard everywhere.

Having said that, as many have previously note, I have noticed that Best Buy is pretty much a rip off for most items. For most electronics, unless you catch them during a sale, you will be overcharged. For some, such as laptops and PCs, even if you catch them during a sale, you will be overcharged. Don't even get me started on the highway robbery that is their cords mark-up; I noticed not even a week ago they were charging around $30 for a 6-foot USB 2.0 extension cord (Newegg sells them for around $10, including shipping). I haven't checked, but I am sure this pattern extends to all their electronics as well (except for items like PS3s and maybe iPods (not sure here, never really prices and iPod), which have a set price from the supplier everywhere).

I have seen them run that franchise into the ground over the past 5 or so years. I don't think that other box stores (Target, Wal-Mart) and online sales are the culprit, just the end result of their mismanagement. I hate to say it, given that I actually own 205 shares of BBY stock presently, but Best Buy rather deserves to fail at this point. Don't worry about me though, I am sure I'll make out like a bandit in whatever merger/sell-out deal they go for... ;) (that, and I own Target and Wal-Mart shares as well, so Best Buy's loss is their gain, essentially)

Best Buy deserves to go down in flames. It's been overpriced since the early 2000's and sells outdated equipment on top of lying to cellular customers about how much their plans will actually cost. I know this because I work for a cellular company.

Best Buy also overcharges on stuff you can buy online and save literally up to $100 or more on if you purchase from newegg or tigerdirect. Even Amazon has better prices on just about everything BB carries.

I wouldn't be sad to see them restructured back into what made them big: affordable quality goods and honesty.