It was 9:30 pm, two weeks before Christmas, and I was standing in a humongous line at Best Buy.
This is not where I wanted to be. I hate shopping in stores during the holidays and even Best Buy late on a Thursday in the middle of December wasn’t immune to the crowds that I had hoped to avoid. Unfortunately, the only place I could pick up a functioning cable modem after mine unceremoniously bit the dust that night was this Best Buy store just north of Seattle. And the line to checkout couldn’t have gone slower.
I thought to myself, “This is why people go online to shop.” Apparently, someone else agreed with me.
Forbes recently ran a piece that went viral about how Best Buy is going out of business gradually. After my experience in their stores, I thought a classic breakdown was right down my alley. Here’s the part that really resonated with me:
Best Buy and other traditional retailers complain that Amazon can undercut them in prices because the site doesn’t charge sales tax, and that Amazon customers use Best Buy as their showroom, taking advantage of the extensive, well-stocked locations and knowledgeable staff to research products they actually buy from someone else online.
Online competitors are certainly part of Best Buy’s problem, but not for the reasons it thinks. What’s really going on is more basic. Best Buy just doesn’t understand its customers’ point of view.”
And that started a wave of posts, blogs, retweets and Facebook comments about the state of Best Buy and the state of big box retail.
I’m not very interested in that at this point. I’ve done almost all of my Christmas shopping online for the past decade. I’ve been an Amazon prime member for years, making it easier to use Amazon for purchases of convenience. I think there are still many people who will always think to step foot in a store before going online but people who act exclusively that way are becoming more and more rare.
Of course, when something like this happens where a piece of analysis explodes into the public’s consciousness, companies have a couple different options. They can ignore it, they can respond with an ultra-conservative, safe statement, they can be dismissive or angrily deny it, or, they can develop some other sort of response.
Best Buy decided to respond in several ways. One of them was to have their CEO, Brian Dunn, write a post on their blog talking about the media coverage, explain where they agreed and disagreed with it, and tell their side of the story. Next Thursday, they will also be featured on a program on CNBC which will open the doors of Best Buy to television audiences.
The TV program makes sense if Best Buy has any semblance of its act together. There will likely be critical elements to the show that may paint the company in not the best light, but it also seems like a good way to really look inside Best Buy. And while the CEO’s blog post was panned by some folks, I actually think it was a good move, especially internally.
If you look at the public post Dunn made on their blog, you’ll see a lot of reader comments attached to it. If there is any moderation going on, it looks to be pretty light because there are some very rough comments there. But here is where things get interesting: I don’t think the post was really for external customers. I’m sure that some of them will read the post (and a few responded as well), but I can pretty much guarantee that a much larger proportion of the message is intended for Best Buy employees. And there are a few reasons this makes sense:
We know there are smart, capable people in every organization, and Best Buy is no exception. With a combination of leadership from the top, transparency, pushing for change, and letting capable people do their job, we may see that Best Buy won’t gradually go out of business.
They may change, evolve and adapt to what consumers want, but we know they can survive and thrive — if they make the right choices.
