Try your hand at the Spore Creature Creator and win free stuff from Big Download!

AOL Money & Finance

Best Buy's strategy contrasts Circuit City's situation

With consumer electronics retailer Circuit City (NYSE:CC) shrinking like a dried prune and cutting employees to the tune of more than 3,400, as well as closing stores, fellow and larger competitor Best Buy (NYSE:BB) is doing the exact opposite: adding stores and employees. A new Best Buy store in Sierra Vista, California is a new concept design, meant to be more open and inviting (especially in big-ticket areas like flat-panel TVs). Over 1,000 applications for employment were received for the 90 positions that were eventually filled. Somehow, I don't think Circuit City would have gotten the same response (insert tongue in cheek here).

What is Best Buy doing that is so right that Circuit City is doing so wrong these days? One of them comes down to employee hiring and development. In fact, the hiring at the new Sierra Vista store produced a rather neat quip from a Best Buy store manager: "We did look for experienced employees, but mostly we considered work ethic and a willingness to learn." This makes sense, as Best Buy's customer experience (which has morphed over the last 10 years) will most likely need to be ingrained into new employees.

Want another quote? Try this: "Our goal is to respect our customers -- to differentiate ourselves and make it a very personable experience so we can take care of them." This sounds like a quote from another retailer that I've followed -- Wal-Mart. Can Best Buy really follow through on this premise? Time will tell. So far, though, it's not having trouble selling merchandise and making profits (unlike the competition), so something's working, right?

Related Posts

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Add your comments

Please keep your comments relevant to this blog entry. Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments.

When you enter your name and email address, you'll be sent a link to confirm your comment, and a password. To leave another comment, just use that password.

To create a live link, simply type the URL (including http://) or email address and we will make it a live link for you. You can put up to 3 URLs in your comments. Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically converted — no need to use <p> or <br> tags.

New Users

Current Users

Symbol Lookup
IndexesChangePrice
DJIA+73.0311,288.54
NASDAQ-6.082,245.38
S&P 500+1.381,262.90

Last updated: July 04, 2008: 03:58 PM

BloggingStocks Exclusives

Hot Stocks

BloggingStocks Featured Video

TheFlyOnTheWall.com Headlines

WalletPop Headlines

AOL Business News

Latest from BloggingBuyouts

Sponsored Links

My Portfolios

Track your stocks here!

Find out why more people track their portfolios on AOL Money & Finance then anywhere else.

Weblogs, Inc. Network