Best Buy Kills Off Future Shop

Lirodon writes: Future Shop, a Canadian electronics chain that was bought by Best Buy in 2001, but continued to operate in parallel with the newly-opened Canadian locations of the U.S. retailer, is no more. Today, the company abruptly announced the closure of the Future Shop chain, and the permanent closure of 66 of its remaining 131 locations. The remaining 65 Future Shop locations (specifically, those that weren't within driving, or even walking distance of a Best Buy to begin with) will be converted to Best Buy stores over the next few days.

This is just the latest step in Best Buy's efforts to downsize its Canadian operations and focus on online retail. The new, downsized chain will consist of 136 Best Buy stores (and 56 of the small Best Buy Mobile stores) in Canada. Still, it's sad to see such an iconic brand killed off like this.

Comments

Re:FTA

[Guspaz]

Because Amazon Canada's selection is pretty terrible compared to Amazon USA. Best Buy sells the ROG Swift monitor for $900, with free shipping or local pickup. Amazon doesn't sell the monitor directly, has it for $1000, and doesn't offer free shipping at all (due to them not selling it directly).

Re: The Canadian middle class is dying out.

[cbiltcliffe]

Almost a million dollars (CDN) for any decent-sized house that isn't a dump.

You must have only looked in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal. Anything upwards of about $600,000 in the London area gets you an absolute mansion.

As an example: 4 bedrooms, 4 1/2 bathrooms, a huge lot, inground pool, 2 car garage, tons of landscaping, fountains, etc, for $715,000.
http://www.realtor.ca/propertyDetails.aspx?PropertyId=15394802

If that place qualifies as either a dump, or too small, then you have no right to bitch about the price of property, because you must pretty much be a 1%er.

Take a look at the $700,000 - $800,000 range:
http://www.realtor.ca/Map.aspx#CultureId=1&ApplicationId=1&RecordsPerPage=9&MaximumResults=9&PropertyTypeId=300&TransactionTypeId=2&SortOrder=A&SortBy=1&LongitudeMin=-81.48207731193361&LongitudeMax=-81.01035184806642&LatitudeMin=42.886606758167304&LatitudeMax=43.087019589728655&PriceMin=700000&PriceMax=800000&BedRange=0-0&BathRange=0-0&ParkingSpaceRange=0-0&viewState=m&Longitude=-81.24621458&Latitude=42.98689485&ZoomLevel=11&CurrentPage=1

There are plenty of huge houses, 3 car garages, etc, in there.

If you want to look at the more realistic for most people range of $300,000 to $400,000:
http://www.realtor.ca/Map.aspx#CultureId=1&ApplicationId=1&RecordsPerPage=9&MaximumResults=9&PropertyTypeId=300&TransactionTypeId=2&SortOrder=A&SortBy=1&LongitudeMin=-81.48207731193361&LongitudeMax=-81.01035184806642&LatitudeMin=42.886606758167304&LatitudeMax=43.087019589728655&PriceMin=300000&PriceMax=425000&BedRange=0-0&BathRange=0-0&ParkingSpaceRange=0-0&viewState=m&Longitude=-81.24621458&Latitude=42.98689485&ZoomLevel=11&CurrentPage=1

You'll still find plenty of very nice houses in there, too.

Re:The Canadian middle class is dying out.

[epine]

This is a huge change from what the country was once like, when it had a robust middle class.

First of all, this is the norm among industrialized economies. Perhaps Norway is different. I haven't checked since the fracking boom.

Second, the thriving middle class was a fairly short lived affair, centered around three decades from 1950–1980. Most affluent societies have now returned to pre-1930s levels of economic inequality. Historically, an affluent middle class is the exception and not the norm.

I had a college roommate whose brawny younger brother dropped out of high school with few skills and somehow got a job with the CAW at a starting wage north of $70,000 per year, back in the early 1980s. He soon had a wife and children, a driveway filled with expensive motor toys, and cash-flow problems.

He was almost certainly employed at a factory making automotive products that discerning consumers—those of us lacking misty-eyed Big Three loyalty—did not wish to purchase.

Meanwhile, high school drop-outs trying to scrape by on non-union wages weren't necessarily doing much better than those same people today, a major difference being that the majority of those fantasy union jobs have now gone away.

Someone needs to get in a time travel booth to go back to the early 1970s to inform the CAW management group that no matter what course of action they chose, their business model (high union wages for semi-skilled labour) could not survive selling shit product. Marketing the hell out shit product was a short-term solution at best (Future Shop—ultimately—not excepted).

As much as the Reagan and Thatcher plutocrats initiated a self-serving destruction of the middle class, the middle class itself was hardly blameless.

Now it's time for the plutocrats to determine whether they can recognize how they are painting themselves into a non-viable corner before they encounter a messy corrective force of their own seeding.

Beware, fellow plutocrats, the pitchforks are coming