Best Buy and the Smartphone Era

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Best Buy and the Smartphone Era

Post by BatteryMill »

In a time when desktop computers were beige bulkatrons, when games were packaged in sleek boxes rather than as icons on Steam, and when there was no threat from online trends such as Amazon, Best Buy and its' rivals were king. With these functions, Best Buy often had stores loaded with décor in elaborate signs and layouts, racks filled with color and merchandise, and an exciting atmosphere for any kind of shopper. This was even true in their 2000s stores, still filled with knick-knacks and electronics of all sorts.

Nowadays, Best Buy has been renovating their stores to a plain, Apple Store-lookalike design (the original remodels in 2012 were heavily, and I mean, heavily inspired off of those), no holds barred. Yes, sometimes the nostalgia kicks in and you may just seem like the wrong generation to see this as memorable, but there's definitely a lack of variety and much room for improvement too. There's nothing but rather flat and conventional tables with today's devices, large touchscreen "smart" gizmo displays for whatever latest, simply-named, and screen-containing alternative to an everyday household item there is, and monotone colors throughout the store. Then, we also have the "forced" remodels now, upgrading all their stores to this strange concept, even adding things such as those dreadful, unreadable vertical "pylon" signs and changing the store layout to become a confusing scribble rather than straightforward corridors and simple rows of merchandise.

Can Best Buy even be as fresh and vibrant as even a couple of years ago? The mobile era is really shrinking, wearing down, and giving a bad vibe to their stores. I know they may be wanting to push online more, but since they still adore their brick-and-mortar business, why can't they improve with that?
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Re: Best Buy and the Smartphone Era

Post by pseudo3d »

Part of it is a failure to understand their core consumer. Best Buy has had a problem where it's used as a "showroom" for products that consumers can observe in real life, then buy off Amazon. It creates traffic but not really sales. The big problem with "mainstream" electronics stores (not necessarily niche stores like Micro Center or Fry's Electronics) is that it's driven by incompetent salespeople who are more interested in selling you expensive cables than actually being well-versed in what exactly they're selling.
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Re: Best Buy and the Smartphone Era

Post by Alpha8472 »

I remember when the main sale floor at Best Buy was music. There were aisles upon aisles of the music. The DVD section was also quite huge with a great variety of DVD movies and TV shows. Now the music section has all but disappeared and the movies section is mostly limited to recently released movies. The fun of discovering new movies, TV series, and music all gone.

Best Buy once was a fun place to explore. Now it is a shell of its former self.

You might go there to look for a cell phone, but people only get new cell phones once a year or so. Computers can last for years and there isn't any reason to get a new computer every year.

I understand that Best Buy is just trying to survive by devoting floor space to cell phones. In time, Best Buy may downsize their stores to become only mobile phone stores. That would save money as most people are not buying other types of electronics as they used to.
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Re: Best Buy and the Smartphone Era

Post by Super S »

I don't remember the exact year Best Buy arrived in Portland, but the stores were impressive when they opened. There are still people like myself who prefer to have a hands-on look at items like televisions and stereos so I can get a feel of how the controls etc. work and the ease of use. Plus having local support in the event of a bad product which may need returned. I work in a position that requires varying shifts, and am also leery of having packages sitting around if I am at work, especially since we have sometimes unreliable mail delivery in my area and it shows up as late as 7:30 at night. Sometimes you are at the mercy of whatever shipping method the seller chooses.

I find myself visiting Fry's most of the time for larger electronics purchases these days. Yes, it's a bit of a drive but they carry a lot of less-common items such as cassette decks for home receivers as well as outdoor antennas (something Radio Shack once had a good variety of). They also seem to have a more broad brand selection.

Best Buy still has good deals from time to time but I find the stores lacking in experienced salespeople for the most part.
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Re: Best Buy and the Smartphone Era

Post by BatteryMill »

pseudo3d wrote:Part of it is a failure to understand their core consumer. Best Buy has had a problem where it's used as a "showroom" for products that consumers can observe in real life, then buy off Amazon. It creates traffic but not really sales. The big problem with "mainstream" electronics stores (not necessarily niche stores like Micro Center or Fry's Electronics) is that it's driven by incompetent salespeople who are more interested in selling you expensive cables than actually being well-versed in what exactly they're selling.
Wasn't it not much of a problem in the days before Amazon? They had some excellent showroom pieces previously (Magnolia Home Theater, the audio display, anything else), and they worked fine. Whatever it was, there was an immersive display not seen in the current Best Buy. As for now, they could improve on that, and try to incorporate these niche elements. Oh well, that's the big blue box you see everywhere. Still reliable in some places, however. It's not as catastrophic as Twin Cities neighbor Target right now, to say.
Alpha8472 wrote:I remember when the main sale floor at Best Buy was music. There were aisles upon aisles of the music. The DVD section was also quite huge with a great variety of DVD movies and TV shows. Now the music section has all but disappeared and the movies section is mostly limited to recently released movies. The fun of discovering new movies, TV series, and music all gone.

Best Buy once was a fun place to explore. Now it is a shell of its former self.

You might go there to look for a cell phone, but people only get new cell phones once a year or so. Computers can last for years and there isn't any reason to get a new computer every year.

I understand that Best Buy is just trying to survive by devoting floor space to cell phones. In time, Best Buy may downsize their stores to become only mobile phone stores. That would save money as most people are not buying other types of electronics as they used to.
Well... I do not exactly remember this, but I would say that it was inspired from the original concept of Best Buy from before? I do not remember it too much, but I guess it's true. I do rarely see this in the remodeled stores now. That's too bad that everything's digital.

...What about the appliances, car stuff, gaming machines, and TVs? It's not like they can just store absolutely everything in a tiny screen.

Also, if anyone does want to know, strangely, if I can recall, Best Buy has not opened a single completely new big-box store since 2010. That, maybe is why they are not succeeding.
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Re: Best Buy and the Smartphone Era

Post by pseudo3d »

BatteryMill wrote:
pseudo3d wrote:Part of it is a failure to understand their core consumer. Best Buy has had a problem where it's used as a "showroom" for products that consumers can observe in real life, then buy off Amazon. It creates traffic but not really sales. The big problem with "mainstream" electronics stores (not necessarily niche stores like Micro Center or Fry's Electronics) is that it's driven by incompetent salespeople who are more interested in selling you expensive cables than actually being well-versed in what exactly they're selling.
Wasn't it not much of a problem in the days before Amazon? They had some excellent showroom pieces previously (Magnolia Home Theater, the audio display, anything else), and they worked fine. Whatever it was, there was an immersive display not seen in the current Best Buy. As for now, they could improve on that, and try to incorporate these niche elements. Oh well, that's the big blue box you see everywhere. Still reliable in some places, however. It's not as catastrophic as Twin Cities neighbor Target right now, to say.
It wasn't a problem pre-Amazon (or at least Amazon as an "everything" retailer) because there was nothing to compare it to. You could probably compare prices around town (and all of them would be at steep markups) or drag around a paper catalog for many products (before Apple stores, a pretty big part of Mac sales were smaller catalog retailers). Today you can just pull out your phone and look up the same product easily, which was near impossible in the old days.

I'm not sure about Target's situation, while they've certainly shot themselves in the foot recently, it's not "hanging themselves" like what Sears/Kmart seem intent on doing, but Target's problem is also core consumer issues, though unlike Best Buy who tended to drift away from their core consumer, Target chose to go from "nicer version of the local store ending in 'mart'" to some sort of hybrid that allegedly sold 'cheap chic' clothing and gift items mixed with essentially an expanded drug store mix, then chose to get involved in culture wars that lost more customers than it won.
Also, if anyone does want to know, strangely, if I can recall, Best Buy has not opened a single completely new big-box store since 2010. That, maybe is why they are not succeeding.
Best Buy also remodeled a large Houston store a few years to downsize in order to add "Pacific Kitchen & Home", a subsidiary of theirs.
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Re: Best Buy and the Smartphone Era

Post by architect »

pseudo3d wrote:
BatteryMill wrote: Also, if anyone does want to know, strangely, if I can recall, Best Buy has not opened a single completely new big-box store since 2010. That, maybe is why they are not succeeding.
Best Buy also remodeled a large Houston store a few years to downsize in order to add "Pacific Kitchen & Home", a subsidiary of theirs.
In stores with the Pacific Kitchen & Home departments, the department has taken over all appliance sales for the store. As a result, there isn't a true loss of square footage for se, but rather an expansion into the high-end appliances which hold significantly better margins than mass-market appliances. A good portion of DFW stores have received these remodels, and they seem to be well-trafficked whenever I visit.

Also, the reason why Best Buy has not opened any new stores recently is likely due to the fact that suburban growth in most metro areas has just rebounded over the last couple of years following the recession. As a result, there has been little new retail development in areas which Best Buy did not already have stores. In addition, a good portion of residential development in many markets is now centered around dense housing redevelopment within urban cores, rather than large scale suburban sprawl.
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Re: Best Buy and the Smartphone Era

Post by wnetmacman »

I can give you two words that sum up Best Buy's lack of activity:

Circuit City

Their collapse scared Best Buy to its core, and while they have made *some* changes, it really doesn't amount to much. Best Buy is now an Electronics Convenience Store and Showroom. Folks don't go there to buy. They go to look, and to purchase immediate needs.

Comparing to Micro Center and Fry's is really unfair. These two only appear in certain large metro areas, and not in every metro like Best Buy. They also tend to lean more into Computers, while Fry's does have a large selection of other items. They aren't direct competitors in all areas, and that was the difference. Best Buy and Circuit City were direct competition, and essentially, Best Buy won the battle.
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Re: Best Buy and the Smartphone Era

Post by pseudo3d »

wnetmacman wrote:I can give you two words that sum up Best Buy's lack of activity:

Circuit City

Their collapse scared Best Buy to its core, and while they have made *some* changes, it really doesn't amount to much. Best Buy is now an Electronics Convenience Store and Showroom. Folks don't go there to buy. They go to look, and to purchase immediate needs.

Comparing to Micro Center and Fry's is really unfair. These two only appear in certain large metro areas, and not in every metro like Best Buy. They also tend to lean more into Computers, while Fry's does have a large selection of other items. They aren't direct competitors in all areas, and that was the difference. Best Buy and Circuit City were direct competition, and essentially, Best Buy won the battle.
Micro Center and Fry's are not like Best Buy nor did I compare them, they succeed because they tend to market to "pro" consumers, people who want to build their own PCs rather than buy them. As such, the market is much more limited and only a few of these stores show up in even the largest of metro areas. The salespeople there actually dress in nice clothing and not just blue polo shirts.

Circuit City's problem was that it became too similar to Best Buy and of course, Best Buy won. The "old" Circuit City up until the middle of 2000s had stores that were completely different than Best Buy. Best Buy was/is a brightly lit, open store, while Circuit City had low ceilings painted black. I have no pictures of what Circuit City was like, but it was far darker than any other store I had been in. Circuit City's fall from grace was when they switched from commission sales to hourly, then lowered hourly pay, and then tried to make their stores like Best Buy, except they were generally smaller and just felt like a poor knockoff.
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Re: Best Buy and the Smartphone Era

Post by BatteryMill »

Been a few years, showing a number of interesting trends so I'm taking in a few notes about the evolution of Best Buy.

Closings are still commonplace in the chain. I assume these are primarily to decrease store density, limiting the spread to only a few per metro area (equivalent to the density of indoor shopping malls, or Wegmans for instance) compared to their 2000s strategy of market saturation (on the level of lighter big-box stores like PetSmart or Famous Footwear).

While BB has opened only one entirely new big-box location in the U.S. since 2011, the chain has for some reason undertaken numerous relocations of existing stores. I see the value in some that they wanted to get better frontage, but most of these situations could have been solved with appropriate remodeling at their existing locations (some of these new sites are marginally smaller).

Back to the main subject of the thread, I would like to update some of the notes I have taken on Best Buy's design experience. The banners previously lining the store perimeter have been taken down, giving the interior a rather bare appearance with nothing but plain white/tan walls to show. Meanwhile the floorplan has probably become the most disorganized it has been in their history, with a lack of clear pathways being intersped with wide-open spaces and no sense of specific zones as BB was good at designing in the past.

I assert that even though the product mix has vastly changed, Best Buy can still wrap their current model of brand-focused displays around nicely in a matter reminiscent of the old days. Here are some examples.
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