The Sad Slow Decline of the Best Buy Retail Experience
I’ve enjoyed going to Best Buy stores in my area for the past twenty years. There’s still something fun about picking up a piece of tech and looking at it physically before then getting to take it home right that second. I used to buy DVDs and video games on discs there too when I was more interested in physical media.
These days, outside of one shiny flagship store out near the airport in the next city over, my local Best Buys look grim. It’s not yet to the level that Fry’s Electronics declined to in their final days — but it’s edging uncomfortably close to the point where that might be a looming possibility, at least here in the Portland, Oregon metro area.
Looking quickly at their stock price numbers, it seems like Best Buy’s gone stagnant across the last five years, not counting the healthy impermanent boost during the lockdowns similar to inflated gains seen across other tech-centric companies. I’m not a professional analyst or a business expert by any means, but this stagnation is probably not what they were going for. Demand has clearly softened since the mad pandemic rush to buy all the home entertainment, but the stores in my area are a markedly worse shopping experience now than they were before that awful experience, and that isn’t great.
