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Best Buy ruled retail until it was knocked sideways by the Internet. Can it make a comeback, or is the big-box era officially over?
But Best Buy faced an even more fundamental challenge: The entire big-box retail industry appeared to be dying...
The mobile Internet posed an even larger problem for big boxes. Showrooming was a potentially existential challenge—customers coming into the store to get hands-on experience with a product, then whipping out their smartphone to purchase it from Amazon at a lower price...
What is even more interesting comes midway through the article: BestBuy still sells a lot of stuff, so even though there are challenges ahead the bulk of sales today remain in stores.
"It’s the biggest PC retailer, the biggest independent phone retailer, and the largest camera retailer in the world. It sells more tablets than any other retailer—including Apple. Last year, Best Buy clocked $50 billion in sales, roughly the same as in 2010. That’s about 50 percent more than the next-largest consumer-electronics retailer, Walmart. Analysts estimate that Amazon does just about $14 billion in annual electronics sales."