Several folks sent me the link to this article by Larry Downes about why the Best Buy chain may soon go the way of the passenger pigeon, the dodo bird, Egghead Software, The Good Guys, Circuit City and Michele Bachmann's candidacy. It's all a piece with what I've written about here in the past when Egghead, Good Guys and Circuit City went under. They couldn't survive because no one there knew anything. (Come to think of it, that probably applies to Bachmann, too.)
In my visits to Best Buy, as with the other similar-type places that sold electronics and computers, I've always been stunned by how little the staff knows about what they're selling. It's not hard to imagine the reason. All the marketing surveys and studies that management does must tell them that the number one thing customers care about is price. So to get prices down as low as possible, they pay their sales crew as little as possible…which means that folks who know stuff don't stick around. The last time I was in a Best Buy, I asked the manager (the manager, mind you) of the computer department which of the external hard drives they sold had eSATA connections. He looked at me with those "first season" Barney Rubble eyes of his and asked, "What's eSATA?" I was going to suggest he go Google it but I was afraid he'd ask me, "What's Google?"
Yeah, there's a logic to trying to get prices down. The problem is that's a contest that brick-and-mortar retailers are never going to win. It will always be cheaper to buy something if you search the Internet. Where places like Best Buy might be able to compete is in offering what you can't get buying from Amazon: Someone to talk to.
I remember back when I was buying a lot of electronics, my main source was an outlet of Good Guys over on La Cienega that was open 24 hours. I'd go in there at 2 AM or 3 AM and there were always people in the story and half the time, one of them was Ben Stein being somewhat brusque to some salesperson. In spite of that, I bought there for two reasons. One was the power of immediate acquisition. I could walk out with the item instead of waiting days for a U.P.S. guy. In fact, I could take it home, decide it was wrong and return it before an Amazon order could have arrived. Good Guys, unlike Best Buy in the article, was real good at exchanges.
The other reason was that they had a guy there named Ron, and Ron really knew computers and TVs and digital cameras and all the kinds of things I was buying. I could tell him what I was looking for and he'd show me three or four products and give me the pros and cons of each. He'd show me how to operate something and there were a couple of times when I got my purchase home, then called him up at the store at 4 AM to ask a question about installation.
The last time I bought from him was on what he told me was his last day there. Even with the commissions on all the stuff I'd bought including a big screen TV, he wasn't making enough to stay in that job. The next time I went in there, the salesguy I got didn't know which ink cartridges went with which of the printers they sold. When I figured out the right kind, they were out of them but the fellow thought they might be getting more in, next week. Or the week after. Or maybe the week after that. So much for the joys of Immediate Acquistion.
If I'm going to get that kind of service, I might as well buy on the Internet. It's cheaper, they usually have what I want in stock and someone brings it to my doorstep in three days. So while I might miss Ron, I don't miss Good Guys and I'm not going to miss Best Buy. I have a feeling I'm not going to be missing Best Buy very soon.