It’s already been a big week for Best Buy news, none of it reflecting very well on the future of the company. First, talks to take the company private under the leadership of its original founder abruptly collapsed. Then they named a new CEO with no retail experience yesterday and their share price declined ten percent. Today’s they released quarterly earnings featuring, among other things, a fifty percent decline in operating income.
The End of Retail, in other words, is alive and well at Best Buy. Farhad Manjoo’s Best Buy turnaround plan seems like a gambit that could be worth pursuing, but this is clearly a company that’s running out of time.
