The Gradual Death of the Brick and Mortar Tech Store

Cutting_Crew writes "As we all know brick and mortar stores have been closing left and right recently. We had CompUSA, Borders and Circuit City all close their doors within the last 4 years. According to an article on Forbes.com, it is spelled out pretty clearly why Best Buy is next in line to shut its doors for good. Some of the reasons highlighted include a 40% drop is Best Buy stock in 2011, lack of vision regarding their online services, management too concerned with store sales instead of margins and blatant disregard for quality customer service."

Comments

Thank god we still have Radio Shack

[n1ywb]

Thank god we still have Radio Shack. I went in recently and found they were even selling arduinos. I've bought a bunch of components there for my electronics projects. It's not Fry's, but at least there's one 10 minutes away from my home in Nowhereville Vermont.

Re:Thank god we still have Radio Shack

[mjwx]

Thank god we still have Radio Shack. I went in recently and found they were even selling arduinos. I've bought a bunch of components there for my electronics projects. It's not Fry's, but at least there's one 10 minutes away from my home in Nowhereville Vermont.

Australia lost anything resembling radio shack years ago. Dick Smith Electronics was once a store where you could go in and buy capacitors, electronics kits (pre-arduino days) and just about anything else you need. Now days they sell phone plans, Norton AV and overpriced HDMI cables.

If I want electronics components I go online, especially if I dont want to pay a 400% mark up (this is not hyperbole, it's Australia).

But I figure this is the way all shops are going. Frontage is becoming less and less important with the advent of smart phones. An online business with a warehouse in an industrial district near the airport is just as competitive as a store-front in the CBD with millions walking past each day. If I see a PC component I want in a store, the first thing I'll do is look up prices on StaticIce to see how much cheaper it is if I order online. I dont think the traditional storefront is going to survive for too many more decades, rather we'll start to see kiosks attached to large automated warehouses (basically forklifts on rails). You buy what you want at the kiosk and it gets picked out and delivered to you shortly. We're already hallway there with Australian supermarkets providing an order online function and having that delivered to your house.

I think people are getting over the appeal of seeing a product and will happily give it up for some savings. Obviously this doesn't apply to all industries but to things we consider a chore like grocery shopping are the prime candidates.

Re:Thank god we still have Radio Shack

[Danieljury3]

Isn't 1/5 a bit generous. I went into one last year and the only electronics stuff they had was a soldering iron. I think at the time I was looking for some solder which they didn't have. Jaycar is the place to go for electronics stuff in Aus/NZ

Re:Thank god we still have Radio Shack

[Pubstar]

Frys is good as long as: A) You know exactly what you want and B) You avoid the white sticker of doom. I went in, bought a Razer Lycosa keyboard from them. I kept getting phantom keystrokes from the keyboard. No problem, just update firmware? Didnt fix it. New drivers? Didn't fix it. Different computer? Didn't fix it. Okay, so the keyboard is obviously broken. After talking to someone at Razer, they told me that the keyboard was faulty and to return it instead of sending it to them for replacement. I get into Fry's, tell them its broken, and I watch them repack it, slap on a 5% discount sticker on it, and have someone go put it back on the shelf. Oh, and don't even get me started on how many DOA HDDs my dad and I bought from them that all had white stickers.

Re:Thank god we still have Radio Shack

[dgatwood]

I've never seen this, and I return defective products to Fry's at least three or four times per year. If you tell them the item is defective, they put a sticker on it, but the sticker says "Return to vendor". They only stick the rebate sticker on it if you tell them you changed your mind about it. So either you weren't clear enough when you told them that it was defective, or you went to a Fry's store that is poorly run compared with my local store.

I'm dubious about returns because I worry about parts being missing, and I'm dubious about returned hard drives because I wonder if the previous customer dropped them, but for most things, the sticker of doom doesn't bother me too much. Usually it just means that I saved a couple of bucks.

That said, it may depend on the store. Which Fry's store was this?

Re:Thank god we still have Radio Shack

[ShanghaiBill]

you're not going to buy a refrigerator online

Why not? I bought a refrigerator online last year. It had good ratings, I read the reviews, made sure it had all the features I wanted, and then I clicked and bought it. It was delivered two days later.

Re:Thank god we still have Radio Shack

[hairyfeet]

Because reviews from actual geeks is usually worth more than hands on? I mean holding that Seagate 1.5Tb would have taught me nothing but over a dozen reviews that were 'Holy crap i bought a dozen of these and they all choked and died hard in less than two months!" tells me quite a lot. Take the new netbook I got, most places had it listed as having win 7 32 bit and with a max RAM of 4Gb, but Amazon had as its first review a guy that pointed out it was actually Win 7 X64 and oh it takes 8Gb and here is the link. it was only $6 difference between the 4gb stick and a matched pair at that time so I bought and can say i'm really happy with my EEE. Handling it frankly wouldn't have told me anything more than i already knew since i had handled 12 inch netbooks before and had already tried out a customer's older EEE so i knew what to expect. it was online where they had not only the info about it actually being 64 bit and a link to the matched pair but even a tutorial on how to take the unit apart if you'd like to change out the HDD for an SSD. The first reviewer had actually done that and according to him with 8gb of RAM and an SSD the EEE handles more like a CULV than a netbook.

so I can see wanting to do your shopping online because handling it only tells you about size and feel, it tells you nothing about whether the unit sucks power, or dies 5 minutes after you get it home, runs too hot to watch HD video or struggles with some kinds of content, all that you can find out from reviews. Hell I had a real nice back and forth on a review I did for a Deneb X4, I even ran a couple of programs for the guy and timed them just so he'd know what he was looking at, and i'd probably do the same thing for someone with my new Thuban if they asked on my review, you just can't get that kinda thing offline.

Re:Thank god we still have Radio Shack

[compro01]

$80. The firmware would be for the macroing capability. The thing also glows and doesn't ghost, so you can press as many keys at once as you like.

Re:Thank god we still have Radio Shack

[lord_mike]

Obviously a franchise. A company store would never sell that stuff. The franchise stores are great, 'cos you can still get all the discontinued and outdated Radio Shack items from years past that are still of interest.

Re:Thank god we still have Radio Shack

[Rakarra]

Because I can't imagine somebody buying a a big screen TV or even a laptop based solely on online descriptions (unless you're determined to get Apple gear in which case going to a store and poking at the laptop adds nothing to the decision-making process).

I don't see why you wouldn't buy a TV based on online descriptions. Unless you're at a high-end videophile store, the TV you see in a store will most likely be calibrated incorrectly, have the brightness turned Waaaaay up to match the bright store lighting, and an image split and shared with a hundred other TVs which may or may not be the display's native resolution. Seeing a TV at a store is usually a horrible way to get a judge of image quality and online ratings and tests are a more reliable way than your own eyes to get a good idea of the visual quality. Not a bad way of figuring out how the bezel will look to see if it'll match your den, though.

Re:Thank god we still have Radio Shack

[DigiShaman]

Yes. Dell does run a full hardware diagnostic for all computers being resold.

It's been over 7 year since I've lasted worked for Dell. Back when I lived in Austin, they had a warehouse like facility where trucks could load and unload at the trucking dock. Anyways, my contracted job was to refurbish laptops and desktops. It was a simple matter of taking the unit in question and PXE boot them into hardware diagnostics. When a fault is found, we simply order a replacement part from a list available to us at our console. Within a few minutes, a parts running would search and deliver the part to me in person. Once installed, tests are re-ran. If the test passed, we could save the new hardware configuration to be updated with the service tag. That final configuration determined the new cost of the machine to be sold at. The last step was to PXE boot them again for re-imaging of the OS with drivers. How exactly did the right OS get chosen with the proper drivers slip streamed into them? Not sure, but Dell had the system down to a science. It worked.

Re:Forgot to add older stores

[MightyMartian]

Margins are very low on electronics. You had to move a lot of product to keep a brick and mortar electronics store afloat even before the Internet and Walmart became such huge competitors. Quite frankly I rarely go into them any more. I find even taking shipping into account that I can find better deals online. I haven't bought an actual computer from a brick and mortar store in seven or eight years.

Good riddance.

[Higgins_Boson]

Best Buy is a horrible, horrible place. Those stores are typically overpriced, asshole-filled warehouses with a stench I can only guess is dead animals hidden in the car audio department. Lump all that in with morons on the sales team and even bigger morons in management and you have the reason this place will not be missed by most people.

If you are a Best Buy idiot (read: employee), I apologize for offending you... but you deserve it. Last time I went to a Best Buy was to buy a family member a flat-screen LCD television. I asked for help from no less than 5 people before someone ACTUALLY came back "in a couple of minutes" as promised repeatedly. It was a mistake, especially since the same set was $70 cheaper online. Too bad it was too close to Christmas at the time to bother ordering it online.

Good riddance, assholes.

P.S.
I am sure this will be modded flamebait or troll or whatever... I simply do not care. Especially since those titles (flamer and troll) are used to say "I disagree with you" these days, instead of what they are really meant for. Which is to label someone who actually IS trolling.

web vs. intranet site

[wjcofkc]

Let's not forgot that this is the same place where if you go in citing a price on their website they will pull up an intranet site that is a clone of bestbuy.com with different prices to "prove" you wrong. Getting busted for that was the end of me shopping there.

Re:I never understood how they stayed in business.

[TrekkieGod]

Priced a product online with Google, and it told me that Best Buy had it for a great price. I went there, and found that they had just raised their price by nearly a hundred bucks.

The thing about Best Buy is that the price their advertise online is always lower than the price at the store. I learned this a while back, and as a result I always buy at their online store and choose "pick up at the store."

Usually I'll just avoid them completely, but if they do have a competitive price, or if I can't wait for the shipping from Amazon or Newegg, then at least I save myself the annoyance of going over there expecting a price only to see it 50% more expensive than the price advertised online.

Circuit City had the same problem. Years ago I needed a wireless keyboard, and they had a pretty good deal advertised online. I showed up, saw their in-store price was significantly higher. I figured, "hey, I'll just price-match it at the register," only to have the cashier tell me that they couldn't price-match online offerings, even if they were their own. So I walked to the side to make sure I wasn't blocking anyone else in line, pulled out my PDA and logged on to their website using their public wifi right in front of her (blast from the past, huh? It was before the smartphones took over), ordered the keyboard with pick it up at the store, showed her the confirmation number and asked, "can I pick it up now?"

Re:Black Friday 2011: The Nightmare

[Anonymous Coward]

As a former employee at Best Buy, I can tell you exactly why they make it difficult to buy that stuff. The three big times in the year are Chirstmas, tax time, and back to school. The seasons around each of these events takes up around 70% of the year. In that part of the year, there is only a finite number of an item available at the store you are at any given time. Best Buy will sell out of the hot laptop that everyone wants. Frankly they don't want you buying it if you don't buy the additional warranty or accessories or whatever. If you don't buy it, someone else will. I'm convinced that corporate would just rather have you shop somewhere else. They get shipments twice a week, but there is a million different variations that the public demands so it's hard to keep all of the stock flowing to the exact right places, so it's easier to make it a difficult experience for the grab and go customer who just want to buy four of the laptop with a $5 markup and leave none for customers who might potentially want to buy other items to go with it. Contrast this with Amazon, where they can ship your item from anywhere and it makes little difference to the customer. Best Buy has a pretty decent store transfer and warehouse ordering system, but customers often refuse to wait as they have waited until the last second to buy a gift and only budgeted for the laptop that has been on sale the last six days.