Plea HN: When you go to Best Buy don't go out and buy from Amazon! "Is Best Buy becoming a showroom for online retailers like Amazon?", well, for most people yes, but what if BB bankrupts, which showroom will you go?
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.
I often find myself doing the showroom thing with BB and traditional bookstores - but I typically do not go to the brick and mortar store on purpose to look at stuff. I am usually out with friends or visiting other stores (say, at a mall) and happen to go in. So if BB bankrupts, I am not going to feel particularly affected, because I usually go direct to Amazon anyway. (Prime helps with that motivation)
If that happened, I'd just take greater advantage of online return policies if something was completely off from what was expected. A thorough reading of user reviews usually stops you from buying anything egregiously bad.
I wonder how viable it would be for Amazon to have "showroom" retail locations. They wouldn't even need to have stock, just a place to try out a large selection of merchandise.
Who needs a showroom for most tech products? I can view video reviews and unboxing on Youtube and detailed reviews on dozens of sites. I'm finding that I'm buying more and more products without first trying them out in the store.
I don't think anyone is going to lament the loss of a physical showroom. Especially when online prices are so much better. That coupled with online retailers abilities to provide superior and quick return policies and virtually free shipping, it gets harder to keep supporting the BB's of the world.
If a BB employee can explain to me how their $30 HDMI cable is far superior than the $1 one I bought of Amazon, then perhaps I would shop there more. Also, having a good ole Micro Center nearby gives my one less reason to shop at BB.
I recently tried to buy a cable from their store the other day. They had the cable on their website for $14 dollars (Amazon had it for $6) and I thought to myself, "Well that's not terrible, I'd rather have it today, it is worth the premium." When I got to the store, the best price for the cable, was $30 and the staff said the $14 cable I wanted was online only (it was not easily apparent from their site). Even after driving to the store, I decided I can wait two days and get it for $6 bucks from Amazon.
Big Lots is a better place to go to get a HDMI cable (and a few other cables as well) than Best Buy. I'm not sure which company this says more about, really.
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's historical strategy has been to make profits from accessories like cables. But they have been doing it wrong in the past 5 years. They should be using these accessories to drive foot traffic.
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.
This is actually quite sad to me. As much as I complained about Circuit City and Best Buy with their pushy salesmen and incredibly high prices, there's always a benefit to being able to go to a store and see what you're about to buy. You can't tell the build quality of a laptop by reading an Amazon description. You can't tell the picture quality of a screen by the customer reviews. You can't do side-by-side comparisons with a product in each hand.
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.
When/if Amazon is forced to start collecting sales tax I they'll start selling items locally. They already have a number of distribution centers and I bet people would happily drive out to them to get a product today.
It was a shame when Circuit City went under. However, is there anyone on the planet not affiliated with Best Buy who wouldn't love to see them go bankrupt?
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.
I am so torn as well. CC and BB hardly did anything to distance themselves from online vendors. Their prices suck, services suck, and they don't offer enough variety and/or higher end items.
Best Buy is not going out of business because Amazon is good. Best Buy is going out of business because Best Buy sucks. I feel sorry for anyone who doesn't live near a Fry's.
Best Buy has always been for the desperate 'NEED IT NOW' person, at least for the people who were computer literate.
Even when I worked there in 1999 briefly I only bought the stuff that got returned and had a super low 'open box' price... everything else was gotten from the more grungy hardware shops you find down dark alleyways.
Except for cables, employees got them at invoice and that was like $5 dollars for a $20+ cable :P
Which reminds me, we were pushed hard to make sure customers bought all the accessories we could because the computers themselves were little profit and the cables, mouse pads, whatever all had ridiculous markup.
Interesting - this article blames Amazon, another blamed the iPad squeezing BB's margins. I say the blame lies with the clueless way these stores have been run for years. thehigherlife's anecdote about trying to buy a cable is a good example. Consider the insane irony of the name "Best Buy" in the context of that story.
"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."
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
Went to a physical big box store (it was a future shop, same difference).
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.
The problem with Best Buy selling cables for absurd mark-up levels is that they're trading away brand equity for a few dollars today. How does someone feel if, after buying a cable at Best Buy, he later sees the same cable for sale elsewhere for 1/4 the price? Will he be so willing to go to Best Buy in the future? Will he trust the salesperson's recommendations if he does indeed enter the store again? Traditional accounting methods don't assess the change in value of a company's brand quarter-over-quarter, but they sure do represent the seemingly high profit margins of cables. So, what's a poor executive to do?
So, Best Buy still exists for some combination of two reasons:
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.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadI 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?
Edit: GeekSquad and warranties are the other profit makers
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.
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.
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.
"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...
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
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?