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Best Buy Founder Makes $8.5 Billion Bid To Take Company Private
zacharye writes "Best Buy founder and the company's largest shareholder Richard Schulze has offered as much as $8.5 billion to take the company private. Schulze had been rumored to be preparing a takeover offer for some time, and he recently assembled a team of executives that will run the company if his buyout offer is approved. His offer amounts to between $24 and $26 per share, a premium of as much as 47% over Best Buy's stock price at Friday's close."
Good point, his net worth is only $2.5bn apparently, and I'm curious as to who his backers could possibly be for a company that's been tanking lately. On the other hand, with all the cheezy, unimaginative, and downright obnoxious ploys Best Buy has implemented in the last few years, I can see where losing the stress of those "pesky shareholders" could work in the company's favor. I'd be willing to step into a Best Buy again maybe 6 months after it went private just to see if it has improved. (as it stands now, I'd rather go to a used car lot)
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
dead serious, I have a 100$ best buy card.. Ive had it for 2 years.
today i spent over an hour in my local best buy trying to find something for under 500$ to buy and i simply could not do it. 5-8 years ago, best buy was "the place" to be for a retail store. today, I have free money and cant buy something.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I have a 100$ best buy card.
That will get you a 6' Monster brand HDMI cable, but it's not enough for the extended warranty.
You get old enough (and rich enough) and it's not about the ROI anymore, it's about making 'em do it they way you tell 'em to.
His offer amounts to between $24 and $26 per share, a premium of as much as 47% over Best Buy's stock price at Friday's close..."
Um, SOLD!!
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Title should read "Best Buy Founder Tells World He Will Try To Find $8.5 Billion To Take Company Private"
I doubt he gets it.
I have no doubt that he will.
First he's the founder and billionaire. That means he's got a "track record" among the money crowd.
He will have a plan when he goes shopping for money.
He's the founder who'll rescue the company.
The money guys will be drooling over all the fees, commisions, and every other way they'll make a fortune off of this guy - and they will be right there to help him get his money.
He will can hundreds if not thousands of people, restructure debt, and other things that will stick it up the ass of the working and middle class.
Oh, and he'll probably will NOT have to put up much, if any, of his own money.
Those people live in a different world than you or me. If they get into trouble with debt, the banks kiss their ass and help them to deal with it even if it hurts them. And no one calls them "irresponsible", "free loader" or any of those names. And if need be, some well placed calls to people in Congress and some really cheap taxpayer money will come their way.
They call them "job creators". And if you think he got where he is by hard work and some risk taking, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
Now, I'm gonna go cry myself to sleep.
Everything there is at least 40% over what it costs everywhere else.
He should have bought it through newegg or amazon, it would save him a few billion.
I've always considered Best Buy a terrific example to illustrate the quote "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."
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Full disclosure here: I work on a Geek Squad, one of the few women in the business. Maybe I'm just lucky (large store in NYC, and no, I WON'T say which) but this GS seems a lot better than most of them. The dead weight from the last couple of hiring cycles is long since gone and we've all become a sort of piecewise machine. They also have me selling a fair amount, despite my habit of getting customers cheaper items and discouraging them from certain services and products ("Don't buy an ethernet cable here, don't bother with the restore discs, you can make those yourself and here's how").
The GS is not the problem. We're hamstrung by SOP for the most part. Left to our own devices we'd be giving much better customer service. But there are Ways Of Doing Things, which must be followed on pain of pain. My supe, bless him, allows us to bend the rules just short of breaking in the interest of customer service, and we get very high customer service ratings for a GS.
I guess the point is, we're not all bad. And the stupid high school kid in Bumblefuck, MO isn't representative of the entire brand. If you want good service, BE INFORMED. Ask us questions. Don't be afraid of the machines; they're just tools. Make use of us; we in the GS are the one contingent with a triple-digit IQ in the store. You can get much more than the brochures say.
This actually is very interesting. I don't know what the plan is for this, but i do know that being beholden to shareholders has forced many companies to make business decisions that were not very prudent in the long term.
by going private, this would allow Best Buy to alter their current strategy and become more competitive in the electronics marketplace.
no one is going to invest 8.5 billion dollars for something like this without a solid plan. i can think of dozens of ways to improve their bottom line, and i'm sure that people more experienced than i could think of hundreds. what best buy has at the moment is a huge chain (nationwide?) of retail locations that their local demographic typically depend upon for their electronics needs. however, with amazon and probably newegg biting hard into their overhead, this might be part of a strategy to expand their online presence. this would be a move that the shareholders would never agree to, as it would involve short term loss for long term presence - but as a private entity beholden to none, they could make a mint by simply offering electronics online or 'ship to store' at competitive prices by investing in distribution and warehousing facilities
If there is something you feel feel should be on Slashdot, there is a "Submit Story" link at the bottom of the page. I suggest you use it instead of posting an off topic comment.
You know what would be a smart plan? Re-cast Best Buy as a "test the electronics" store. You charge $50/hour to rent a testing room where you can try any electronics that you like, and a means to easily order from Amazon on the spot.
The store doesn't have to have much stock, or as many employees (since they are not moving a lot of stock around). The would of course also get affiliate commissions from Amazon for all equipment purchased.
The difference is that it would be making money off the way people use Best Buy already...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Creating jobs" at Best Buy right now is like hiring people at a buggy whip factory in the 1930s to escape the depression.
(Never mind the economic absurdity of the whole "job creators" meme in the first place).
iTunes cards - basically you need BB to convert your useless currency (their gift card) into usable currency (iTunes) - which you can then give away as presents or burn through yourself.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Your comment leads me to infer that you believe:
- People are not embarrassed to be on welfare
- People make more money on welfare than on a minimum wage job
- Either: the few people who somehow "game the welfare system" make it not worthwhile for those who use it as a legitimate safety net
- Or: most people who are on welfare are gaming the system and riding the gravy train
- Welfare is cheating you out of your hard-earned money
- You, yourself, will never need a safety net
Jobs are a bit like energy, you can't really "create" them.
I own a business. I can create a job by choosing to hire someone. The job is real; a person would earn money from doing it.
If jobs could truly not be created there would be a fixed number at all times. That is not so.
If there is a market, there will be jobs.
Only if people are willing to enter that market as providers. There is NO market before someone decides there is a possibility of earning money performing some task or offering some service, but it's up to the job creators.
It's up to job creators to enter a market and to create the jobs.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
People are willing to work for a good salary or a good hourly rate.
Drop the hourly rate and the benefits to below living wage, and they have no incentive to work full time, particularly if they can satisfy needs better with the social safety net. Why work if you're still going to bo bankrupt?
Of course, we then say "well then let's drop the value of the safety net so that it's below the wages that are available."
But then you risk another rational choice: criminal activity. Why work legally and go bankrupt if you can work in the gray or illegally and survive? That's where spammers and drug dealers come from.
Most people don't see any particular task as beneath them, but they do see some wage levels as pointless thumb-twirling. You want people to scrub toilets? Pay them an annual wage above the federal poverty level and they'll be happy to. Pay them twice the federal poverty level and they'll whistle while they do it. Pay them at minimum wage or below, and there are very few jobs you can get them to do.
Yes, this picture is incompatible with our macroeconomic situation. But microactors don't care about macroeconomics. They care about making ends meet and accounting to those to whom they are accountable (creditors, utilities, and dependents first amongst these, not "the system").
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Well, I can't speak for all of Geek Squad, but I can assure you, I wasn't handled for my sales ability or for an outgoing personality. I was hired because I'm intelligent and know how to deal with computer issues. Yes, sometimes I end up doing some sales, but if you were to count the number of people I actually sell things to (or even try to sell things to) versus the number that I help--for free--at the counter, just answering questions and fixing minor issues, it's actually a very low ratio.
I think Geek Squad--much like Best Buy as a whole--gets a much worse rep than is deserved. I've said it before, and I'll say it again--they're far from perfect. But from what I've personally experienced, the majority of people who come to us leave satisfied. The problem is that the minority who aren't satisfied are VERY vocal about it. Moreover--and I could go on for hours with examples, but I'll avoid that here--many of the people who are dissatisfied, in my opinion, are that way due to their own unrealistic expectations.
Just a few quick examples: someone who has a TV with nothing more than the manufacturer's warranty comes in just weeks before it's about to expire and wants service done. Since we're bound to honor manufacturer's warranties by the manufacturer's terms, this means we have to send the unit out for service, which can potentially take a couple weeks. At this point, quite a few people just go apeshit. They think that any problem with their device, no matter how minor, entitles them to an immediate replacement to a brand new device, no matter how old their other is. Not only that, but when the unit comes back from service, they expect the warranty to magically be extended for another year (or however long it was originally for). When you have to break it to them that this simply isn't the case, they get pissed off, and then go shouting to anyone that will listen how awful Best Buy and Geek Squad are for something that is entirely out of our hands, and entirely standard across the industry.
Other times, people are just impatient. Computer maintenance takes time, pure and simple, to make sure you're not missing anything. Add on top of that the fact that sometimes you get a backlog of work and can't immediately start service on a person's computer. So, you tell them at check-in that it could take up to a week, and that you will give them a call just as soon as it's finished. So they call back the next day, asking if it's done. And then the next day, asking if it's done, and so on and so forth. When you try to explain to them what you're doing and why it's taking so long, suddenly everyone becomes the most important person in the world. "But I'm a student! I need it for class!" "But I need my computer for my business!" "But I have important emails to respond to!" People just don't seem to understand that EVERYONE thinks they're important, and we can't prioritize service based on how highly you think of yourself. If things were truly so important, you'd have a backup computer. Regardless, even if you manage to get the computer back to them in 4 days, versus a quoted 7, they show up all in a huff, complaining about everything taking so long, and proceed to go out and complain to everyone that'll listen how horrible service is. There's simply no winning with people. And God forbid if you need to send a computer to a service center for serious repairs...
This is pure conjecture on my part, but I'd say the biggest problem for Geek Squad does not necessarily come from the quality of the actual work done, but from the customer service aspect of the interactions. People simply hate being told something will take time, or that something is not covered (no, we won't send your device out just because you're getting near the end of your warranty if it shows absolutely no signs of malfunctioning). Unfortunately, I have no idea what anyone could do to fix that problem.
Yeah, the ones are so much more oney than if you use a non-premium brand HDMI cable that costs 10% of what Monster charges! Monster's cable quality is so superior to other brands - I mean, look at how they crimp on the connection. If you don't get a nice tight crimp with all that hard plastic around it, the zeros will fall out of the cable, and you'll have a big mess on the ground behind your TV, or a bucket that you'll have to dump every once in a while.
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