

Is Best Buy Really Finished? - edw519
http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/05/is-best-buy-really-finished/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo

======
a_a_r_o_n
One of the comments says that BB is Amazon's showroom.

So, here's what they do: officially become an Amazon outlet/showroom.

Cut the number of Best Buy's in any large area, and replace them with really
big showrooms. They get money from Amazon to act as the showroom, and they get
a cut anytime anyone orders "from Amazon" right in the store. "We can ship
that to you from Amazon today ..."

Remove all media. You don't have to see a physical DVD or game to buy it.

One innovation they could enact is to be able to get any item not already in
the showroom at the moment to the floor tomorrow. You can't have _everything_
on the floor, but you can combine Amazon's warehouse/shipping expertise with
Best Buy's sitting on the floor expertise to have a super showroom.

Maybe they keep the name Best Buy. Maybe it becomes BestBuy/Amazon, or maybe
the name disappears and they just become Amazon.

They're already really good at being Amazon's showroom, they may as well get
paid for it.

~~~
meepmorp
Or they could act as Amazon's showroom, as they are now, and get nothing. What
are they gonna do, throw out customers for price shopping?

What's Amazon's incentive for this?

~~~
a_a_r_o_n
Customers can be lost on the trip home from the store. "Nah, I guess I don't
really need that."

------
gamble
I don't really see that BB is inevitably headed for bankruptcy. They've had
some bad financial results lately and some embarrassing service problems, but
they still have a near-monopoly on retail electronics. Their larger problem is
a poor economy and the end of a period of very rapid growth in consumer
electronics.

It's very hard to argue that electronics retailers are necessarily doomed by
the Internet when there's probably an Apple store ten minutes from any given
BB doing more sales per square foot than anyone in the business, selling a
tiny selection you can view in detail and order directly from Apple's own
website. BB just needs to adjust the retail experience to suit higher-margin
customers, as Apple did.

------
joebadmo
Amazon's running a television ad that shows a guy use the Amazon smartphone
app to scan a package of diapers and then _put the diapers back on the shelf_.

I'm hard-pressed to see a way for physical retailers to offer any sort of
competitive advantage, especially since Amazon's customer service is so much
better than everyone besides Apple, despite being online only.

------
Semiapies
What a rambling, useless piece. Downes wrote an article about Best Buy's
problems from a _consumer_ point of view, and Biggs spends half the article
going on about how Downes must have a misconception of what _employees_ think
of it. Then he sadly acknowledges that Downes is pretty much right, anyway.

