by Adam Hartung | Mar 1, 2013 | Current Affairs, In the Swamp, Leadership, Web/Tech
Marissa Mayer created a firestorm this week by issuing an email requiring all employees who work from home to begin daily commuting to Yahoo offices. Some folks are saying this is going to be a blow to long-term employees, hamper productivity and will harm the company. Others are saying this will improve communications and cooperation, thin out unproductive employees and help Yahoo.
While there are arguments to be made on both sides, the issue is far simpler than many people make it out to be – and the implications for shareholders are downright scary.
Yahoo has been a strugging company for several years. And the reason has nothing to do with its work from home policy. Yahoo has lacked an effective strategy for a decade – and changing its work from home policy does nothing to fix that problem.
In the late 1990s almost every computer browser had Yahoo as its home page. But Yahoo long ago lost its leadership position in content aggregation, search and ad placement. Now, Yahoo is irrelevant. It has no technology advantage, no product advantage and no market advantage. It is so weak in all markets that its only value has been as a second competitor that keeps the market leader from being attacked as a monopolist!
A series of CEOs have been unable to develop a new strategy for Yahoo to make it more like Amazon or Apple and less like – well, Yahoo. With much fanfare Ms. Mayer was brought into the flailing company from Google, which is a market leader, to turn around Yahoo. Only she's been on the job 7 months, and there still is no apparent strategy to return Yahoo to greatness.
Instead, Ms. Mayer has delivered to investors a series of tactical decisions, such as changing the home page layout and now the work from home policy. If tactical decisions alone could fix Yahoo Carol Bartz would have been a hero – instead of being pushed out by the Board in disgrace.
Many leading pundits are enthused with CEO Mayer's decision to force all employees into offices. They are saying she is "making the tough decisions" to "cut the corporate cost structure" and "push people to be more productive." Underlying this lies thinking that the employees are lazy and to blame for Yahoo's failure.
Balderdash. It's not employees' fault Yahoo, and Ms. Mayer, lack an effective strategy to earn a high return on their efforts.
It isn't hard for a new CEO to change policies that make it harder for people to do their jobs – by cutting hours out of their day via commuting. Or lowering productivity as they are forced into endless meetings that "enhance communication and cooperation." Or forcing them out of the company entirely with arcane work rules in a misguided effort to lower operating costs or overhead. Any strategy-free CEO can do those sorts of things.
Just look at how effective this approach was for
- "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap at Scott Paper
- "Fast Eddie" Lampert at Sears
- Carol Bartz at Yahoo
- Meg Whitman at HP
- Brian Dunn at Best Buy
- Gregory Rayburn at Hostess
- Antonio Perez at Kodak
The the fact that some Yahoo employees work from home has nothing to do with the lack of strategy, innovation and growth at Yahoo. That failure is due to leadership. Bringing these employees into offices will only hurt morale, increase real estate costs and push out several valuable workers who have been diligently keeping afloat a severely damaged Yahoo ship. These employees, whether in an office or working at home, will not create a new strategy for Yahoo. And bringing them into offices will not improve the strategy development or innovation processes.
Regardless of anyone's personal opinions about working from home, it has been the trend for over a decade. Work has changed dramatically the last 30 years, and increasingly productivity relies on having time, alone, to think and produce charts, graphs, documents, lines of code, letters, etc. Technologies, from PCs to mobile devices and the software used on them (including communications applications like WebEx, Skype and other conferencing tools) make it possible for people to be as productive remotely as in person. Usually more productive removed from interruptions.
Taking advantage of this trend helps any company to hire better, and be more productive. Going against this trend is simply foolish – regardless the intellectual arguments made to support such a decision. Apple fought the trend to PCs and almost failed. When it wholesale adopted the trend to mobile, seriously reducing its commitment to PC markets, Apple flourished. It is ALWAYS easier to succeed when you work with, and augment trends. Fighting trends ALWAYS fails.
Yahoo investors have plenty to be worried about. Yahoo doesn't need a "tough" CEO. Yahoo needs a CEO with the insight to create, and implement, a new strategy. And a series of tactical actions do not sum to a new strategy. As importantly, the new strategy – and its implementation – needs to augment trends. Not go against trends while demonstrating the clout of a new CEO.
If you've been waiting to figure out if Ms. Mayer is the CEO that can make Yahoo a great company again, the answer is becoming clear. She increasingly appears very unlikely to have what it takes.
by Adam Hartung | Jan 8, 2013 | Defend & Extend, In the Rapids, Innovation, Leadership, Web/Tech
The Harvard Business Review recently published its list of the 100 Best Performing CEOs. This list is better than most because it looks at long-term performance of the CEO during his or her time in the job – with many on the list in service more than a decade.
#1 was Steve Jobs. #2 is Jeff Bezos – making him the greatest living CEO. It is startling just how well these two CEOs performed. During Jobs' tenure Apple investors achieved a return of 66.8 times their money. During Mr. Bezos' tenure shareholders achieved a remarkable 124.3 times return on their money. In an era when most of us are happy to earn 5-10%/year – which equates to doubling your money about once a decade – these CEOs exceeded expectations 30-60 fold!
Both of these CEOs achieved greatness by transforming an industry. We all know the Apple story. From near bankruptcy as the Mac company Mr. Jobs led Apple into the mobile devices business, and created a transformation from Walkmen, Razrs and PCs to iPods, iPhones and iPads – to the detriment of Sony, Motorola, Nokia, Microsoft, HP and Dell.
The Amazon story is all the more remarkable because it has been written in the far more mundane world of retail – not known for being nearly as fast-changing at tech.
Lest we forget, Amazon started as an on-line seller of books frequently unavailable at your local bookstore. "What's a local bookstore?" you may now ask, because through continuous upgrading of its capability to build on the advances in internet usage – across machines, browsers, wi-fi and mobile – Amazon drove into bankruptcy such large booksellers as B.Dalton and Borders – leaving Barnes & Noble a mere shell of its former self and on tenous footing. And the number of small bookshops has dropped dramatically.
But Amazon's industry transformation has gone far beyond bookselling. Amazon was one of the first, and by most users considered the best, at offering a complete on-line storefront for any retailer who wants to sell goods through Amazon's site. You can set up your inventory, display products, provide user information, manage a shopping cart and handle check out all through Amazon – with minimal technical skill. This allowed Amazon to bring vastly more products to customers; and without adding all the inventory or warehousing cost.
As digital uses grew, Amazon moved beyond the slow-paced publishers to launch the Kindle and give us eReaders displacing paper books and periodicals. But this was just the first salvo in the effort to promote additional on-line buying, as Amazon next launched Kindle Fire which at remarkably low cost gave people a tablet already set up for doing retail shopping at Amazon.
As Amazon launched its book downloads and on-line services, it built its own cloud services business to aid businesses and people in using tablets, and doing more things on-line; which further reinforced the digital retail world in which Amazon dominates.
And make no doubt about it, Kindle Fire – and the use of all other tablets – is the WalMart and other traditional brick-and-mortar retail killer. Amazon is now a player in all pieces of the transition which is happening in retail, from traditional shopping to on-line.
Demand for retail space in the USA began declining in 2009 and has not stopped. Most analysts blamed it on the great recession. But in retrospect we can now see it was the watershed year for customers to begin looking more, and buying more, on-line. Now each year growth in on-line retail continues, while demand at traditional stores wanes.
Just look at this last holiday season. To (hopefully) drive revenue stores were opening on Thanksgiving, and doing 24 and 48 hours of non-stop staffing and promotions to drive sales. But it was mostly in vain, as traditional retail saw almost no gains. Despite doing more and more of what they've always done – trying to be better, faster and cheaper – they simply could not change the trend away from shopping on-line and back into the stores.
For the last year the #1 trend in retailing has been "showrooming" where customers stand in a store with a smartphone comparison pricing on-line (most frequently Amazon) to the product on the shelf. Retailers were forced to match on-line prices, despite their higher overhead, or lose the business. And now Target has implemented a policy of price-matching Amazon for all of 2013 in hopes of slowing the trend to on-line purchasing.
Circuit City went bankrupt, which saved Best Buy as it picked up their lost business. But now Best Buy is close to failure. Same store sales at WalMart have been flat. JCPenney recruited Apple's retail store wizard as CEO – but he's learned when you have to compete with Amazon life simply sucks. Nobody in traditional retail has found a way to reverse the on-line shopping trend, which is still dominated by Amazon.
We all can learn from these two CEOs and the companies they built. First, and foremost, is understand trends and align with them. If you help people move in the direction they want to go life is easy, and growth can be phenomenal. Trying to slow, stop or reverse a trend doesn't work, and is expensive.
Second, don't ask customers what they want, instead give them what they need. Customers may be on a trend, but they will frame their requests in the old paradigm. By creating new trend-promoting products and solutions you can capture the customer and avoid head-to-head competition with the "old guard" titans selling the increasingly outdated solutions. Don't build better brick-and-mortar, make brick-and-mortar obsolete.
So, what's stopping you from growing your business like Apple or Amazon? What keeps you from being the next Steve Jobs, or Jeff Bezos? Can you spot trends and provide trend-supporting solutions for customers? Or are you stymied because you're spending too much time trying to defend and extend your old business in the face of game changing trends.
by Adam Hartung | Dec 10, 2012 | Current Affairs, Defend & Extend, In the Whirlpool, Leadership, Lifecycle, Television
Remember when almost everyone read a daily newspaper?
Newspaper readership peaked around 2000. Since then printed media has declined, as readers shifted on-line. Magazines have folded, and newspapers have disappeared, quit printing, dramatically cut page numbers and even more dramatically cut staff.
Amazingly, almost no major print publisher prepared for this, even though the trend was becoming clear in the late 1990s.
Newspapers are no longer a viable business. While industry revenue grew for
almost 2 centuries, it collapsed in a mere decade.
Chart Source: BusinessInsider.com
This market shift created clear winners, and losers. On-line news sites like Marketwatch and HuffingtonPost were clear winners. Losers were traditional newspaper companies such as Tribune Corporation, Gannett, McClatchey, Dow Jones and even the New York Times Company. And investors in these companies either saw their values soar, or practically disintegrate.
In 2012 it is equally clear that television is on the brink of a major transition. Fewer people are content to have their entertainment programmed for them when they can program it themselves on-line. Even though the number of television channels has exploded with pervasive cable access, the time spent watching television is not growing. While simultaneously the amount of time people spend looking at mobile internet displays (tablets, smartphones and laptops) is growing at double digit rates.
Chart Source: Silicone Alley Insider Chart of the Day 12/5/12
It would be easy to act like newspaper defenders and pretend that television as we've known it will not change. But that would be, at best, naive. Just look around at broadband access, the use of mobile devices, the convenience of mobile and the number of people that don't even watch traditional TV any more (especially younger people) and the trend is clear. One-way preprogrammed advertising laden television is not a sustainable business.
So, now is the time to prepare. And change your business to align with impending new realities.
Losers, and winners, will be varied – and not entirely obvious. Firstly, a look at those trying to maintain the status quo, and likely to lose the most.
Giant consumer goods and retail companies benefitted from the domination of television. Only huge companies like P&G, Kraft, GM and Target could afford to lay out billions of dollars for television ads to build, and defend, a brand. But what advantage will they have when TV budgets no longer control brand building? They will become extremely vulnerable to more innovative companies that have better products and move on fast lifecycles. Their size, hierarchy and arcane business practices will lead to huge problems. Imagine a raft of new Hostess Brands experiences.
Even as the trends have started changing these companies have continued pumping billions into the traditional TV networks as they spend to defend their brand position. This has driven up the value of companies like CBS, Comcast (owns NBC) and Disney (owns ABC) over the last 3 years substantially. But don't expect that to last forever. Or even a few more years.
Just like newspaper ad spending fell off a cliff when it was clear the eyeballs were no longer there, expect the same for television ad spending. As giant advertisers find the cost of television harder and harder to justify their outlays will eventually take the kind of cliff dive observed in the chart (above) for newspaper advertising. Already some consumer goods and ad agency executives are alluding to the fact that the rate of return on traditional TV is becoming sketchy.
So far, we've seen little at the companies which own TV networks to demonstrate they are prepared for the floor to fall out of their revenue stream. While some have positions in a few internet production and delivery companies, most are clearly still doing their best to defend & extend the old business – just like newspaper owners did. Just as newspapers never found a way to replace the print ad dollars, these television companies look very much like businesses that have no apparent solution for future growth. I would not want my 401K invested in any major network company.
And there will be winners.
For smaller businesses, there has never been a better time to compete. A company as small as Tesla or Fisker can now create a brand on-line at a fraction of the old cost. And that brand can be as powerful as Ford, and potentially a lot more trendy. There are very low entry barriers for on-line brand building using not only ad words and web page display ads, but also using social media to build loyal followers who use and promote a brand. What was once considered a niche can become well known almost overnight simply by applying the new dynamics of reaching customers on-line, and increasingly via mobile. Look at the success of Toms Shoes.
Zappos and Amazon have shown that with almost no television ads they can create powerhouse retail brands. The new retailers do not compete just on price, but are able to offer selection, availability and customer service at levels unachievable by traditional brick-and-mortar retailers. They can suggest products and prices of things you're likely to need, even before you realize you need them. They can educate better, and faster, than most retail store employees. And they can offer great prices due to less overhead, along with the convenience of shipping the product right into your home.
And as people quit watching preprogrammed TV, where will they go for content? Anybody streaming will have an advantage – so think Netflix (which recently contracted for all the Disney content,) Amazon, Pandora, Spotify and even AOL. But, this will also benefit those companies providing content access such as Apple TV, Google TV, YouTube (owned by Google) to offer content channels and the increasingly omnipresent Facebook will deliver up not only friends, but content — and ads.
As for content creation, the deep pockets of traditional TV production companies will likely disappear along with their ability to control distribution. That means fewer big-budget productions as risk goes up without revenue assurances.
But that means even more ability for newer, smaller companies to create competitive content seeking audiences. Where once a very clever, hard working Seth McFarlane (creator of Family Guy) had to hardscrabble with networks to achieve distribution, and live in fear of a single person controlling his destiny, in the future these creative people will be able to own their content and capture the value directly as they build a direct audience. A phenomenon like George Lucas will be more achievable than ever before as what might look like chaos during transition will migrate to a much more competitive world where audiences, rather than network executives, will decide what content wins – and loses.
So, with due respects to Don McLean, will today be the day TV Died? We will only know in historical context. Nobody predicted newspapers had peaked in 2000, but it was clear the internet was changing news consumption behavior. And we don't know if TV viewership will begin its rapid decline in 2013, or in a couple more years. But the inevitable change is clear – we just don't know exactly when.
So it would be foolish to not think that the industry is going to change dramatically. And the impact on advertising will be even more profound, much more profound, than it was in print. And that will have an even more profound impact on American society – and how business is done.
What are you doing to prepare?
by Adam Hartung | Nov 29, 2012 | Defend & Extend, In the Swamp, In the Whirlpool, Leadership, Web/Tech
The web lit up yesterday when people started sharing a Fortune quote from Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, "We are literally moving the company from BlackBerrys to smartphones." Why was this a big deal? Because, in just a few words, Ms. Mayer pointed out that Research In Motion is no longer relevant. The company may have created the smartphone market, but now its products are so irrelevant that it isn't even considered a market participant.
Ouch. But, more importantly, this drove home that no matter how good RIM thinks Blackberry 10 may be, nobody cares. And when nobody cares, nobody buys. And if you weren't convinced RIM was headed for lousy returns and bankruptcy before, you certainly should be now.
But wait, this is certainly a good bit of the pot being derogatory toward the kettle. Because, other than the highly personalized news about Yahoo's new CEO, very few people care about Yahoo these days as well. After being thoroughly trounced in ad placement and search by Google, it is wholly unclear how Yahoo will create its own relevancy. It may likely be soon when a major advertiser says "When placing our major internet ad program we are focused on the split between Google and Facebook," demonstrating that nobody really cares about Yahoo anymore, either.
And how long will Yahoo survive?
The slip into irrelevancy is the inflection point into failure. Very few companies ever return. Once you are no longer relevant, customer quickly stop paying attention to practically anything you do. Even if you were once great, it doesn't take long before the slide into no-growth, cost cutting and lousy financial performance happens.
Consider:
- Garmin once led the market for navigation devices. Now practically everyone uses their mobile phone for navigation. The big story is Apple's blunder with maps, while Google dominates the marketplace. You probably even forgot Garmin exists.
- Radio Shack once was a consumer electronics powerhouse. They ran superbowl ads, and had major actresses parlaying with professional sports celebrities in major network ads. When was the last time you even thought about Radio Shack, much less visited a store?
- Sears was once America's premier, #1 retailer. The place where everyone shopped for brands like Craftsman, DieHard and Kenmore. But when did you last go into a Sears? Or even consider going into one? Do you even know where one is located?
- Kodak invented amateur photography. But when that market went digital nobody cared about film any more. Now Kodak is in bankruptcy. Do you care?
- Motorola Razr phones dominated the last wave of traditional cell phones. As sales plummeted they flirted with bankruptcy, until Motorola split into 2 pieces and the money losing phone business became Google – and nobody even noticed.
- When was the last time you thought about "building your body 12 ways" with Wonder bread? Right. Nobody else did either. Now Hostess is liquidating.
Being relevant is incredibly important, because markets shift quickly today. As they shift, either you are part of the trend going forward – or you are part of the "who cares" past. If you are the former, you are focused on new products that customers want to evaluate. If you are the latter, you can disappear a whole lot faster than anyone expected as customers simply ignore you.
So now take a look at a few other easy-to-spot companies losing relevancy:
- HP headlines are dominated by write offs of its investments in services and software, causing people to doubt the viability of its CEO, Meg Whitman. Who wants to buy products from a company that would spend billions on Palm, business services and Autonomy ERP software only to decide they overspent and can never make any money on those investments? Once a great market leader, HP is rapidly becoming a company nobody cares about; except for what appears to be a bloody train wreck in the making. In tech – lose customesr and you have a short half-life.
- Similarly Dell. A leader in supply chain management, what Dell product now excites you? As you think about the money you will spend this holiday, or in 2013, on tech products you're thinking about mobile devices — and where is Dell?
- Best Buy was the big winner when Circuit City went bankrupt. But Best Guy didn't change, and now margins have cratered as people showroom Amazon while in their store to negotiate prices. How long can Best Buy survive when all TVs are the same, and price is all that matters? And you download all your music and movies?
- Wal-Mart has built a huge on-line business. Did you know that? Do you care? Regardless of Wal-mart's on-line efforts, the company is known for cheap looking stores with cheap merchandise and customers that can't maintain credit cards. When you look at trends in retailing, is Wal-Mart ever the leader – in anything – anymore? If not, Wal-mart becomes a "default" store location when all you care about is price, and you can't wait for an on-line delivery. Unless you decide to go to the even cheaper Dollar General or Aldi.
And, the best for last, is Microsoft. Steve Ballmer announced that Microsoft phone sales quadrupled! Only, at 4 million units last quarter that is about 10% of Apple or Android. Truth is, despite 3 years of development, a huge amount of pre-release PR and ad spending, nobody much cares about Win8, Surface or new Microsoft-based mobile phones. People want an iPhone or Samsung product.
After its "lost decade" when Microsoft simply missed every major technology shift, people now don't really care about Microsoft. Yes, it has a few stores – but they dwarfed in number and customers by the Apple stores. Yes, the shifting tiles and touch screen PCs are new – but nobody real talks about them; other than to say they take a lot of new training. When it comes to "game changers" that are pushing trends, nobody is putting Microsoft in that category.
So the bad news about a $6 billion write-down of aQuantive adds to the sense of "the gang that can't shoot straight" after the string of failures like Zune, Vista and early Microsoft phones and tablets. Not to mention the lack of interest in Skype, while Internet Explorer falls to #2 in browser market share behind Chrome.
Chart Courtesy Jay Yarrow, BusinessInsider.com 5-21-12
When a company is seen as never able to take the lead amidst changing
trends, investors see accquisitions like $1.2B for Yammer as a likely future write down. Customers lose interest and simply spend money elsewhere.
As investors we often hear about companies that were once great brands, but selling at low multiples, and therefore "value plays." But the truth is these are death traps that wipe out returns. Why? These companies have lost relevancy, and that puts them one short step from failure.
As company managers, where are you investing? Are you struggling to be relevant as other competitors – maybe "fringe" companies that use "voodoo solutions" you don't consider "enterprise ready" or understand – are obtaining a lot more interest and media excitment? You can work all you want to defend & extend your past glory, but as markets shift it is amazingly easy to lose relevancy. And it's a very, very tough job to play catch- up.
Just look at the money being spent trying at RIM, Microsoft, HP, Dell, Yahoo…………
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by Adam Hartung | Jul 31, 2012 | Current Affairs, In the Whirlpool, Leadership, Lock-in
In a fascinating move this week, Best Buy's septuagenarion founder (who is no longer part of the company) has started calling company execs and offering them jobs – at Best Buy! Apparently he hopes to engage a private equity firm to take over Best Buy, and he wants to keep some of the exec team, while replacing others. Even more fascinating is that at last some of the execs are taking his calls, and agreeing to his "job offer." Clearly these folks have lost faith in Best Buy's future.
This happens one day after the Board of Directors fired the CEO at Supervalu, parent company of such large grocery chains as Albertson's, Jewel-Osco, ACME, Shaw's and Star Markets. Apparently this pleased most everyone, since the company has lost 85% of its equity value since he was brought in from Wal-Mart while simultaneously killing bonuses and even free employee coffee. Even though just last week he was paid a retention bonus by the same Board to remain in his job!
And even thought the Chairman at Wal-Mart was clearly in the thick of bribing Mexican officials to open stores south of the border, there is no sign of any changes expected in Wal-Mart's leadership team.
What is sparking such bizarre behavior in retail? Quite simply, industry leadership that is so stuck in the past it has no idea how to grow or make money in a dramatically changed marketplace. They keep trying to do more of the same, while growth goes elsewhere.
Everyone, and I mean everyone, outside of retail knows that the game has changed – permanently. Since 2000 on-line sales of everything, and I mean everything, has increased. Sure, there were some collosal flops in early on-line retail (remember Pets.com?) But every year sales of products on-line increase at double digit rates. It's rare to walk through a store – and I mean any store – and not see at least one customer comparison shopping the product on the shelf with an on-line vendor.
What 15 years ago was a niche seller of non-stock books, Amazon.com, has become the industry vanguard selling everything from apple juice to zombie memorabilia. Even though most industry analysts don't clump it as a direct competitor to Best Buy, Sears, and Wal-Mart – holding it aside in its own "internet retail" category – everyone knows Amazon is growing and changing shopping habits, and reducing demand in traditional stores.
The signs of this shift are everywhere. From the complete collapse of Circuit City and Sharper Image to the flat sales, reduced number of U.S. outlets and falling per-store numbers at Wal-Mart.
Across America drivers are accustomed to seeing retail outlets boarded up, and strip malls full of empty window space. You don't have to be a fancy analyst to notice how many malls would be knocked down entirely if they weren't being converted to low-cost office space for lawyers, tax preparers, dentists, veterinarians and emergency clinics – demonstrably non-retail businesses. Or to recognize an old Sears or superstore location converted into an evangelical nondenominational church.
For example, in the collar counties around Chicago vacant retail space has accumulated to over 3million square feet – a 45% increase since 2007. In that local market retail rents have fallen to $16.76 per foot, down 29% in the last four years. And this is typical of just about everywhere. America simply has a LOT more retail space than it needs – and will need for the foreseeable future. Demand for traditional retail is going down, not up, and that is a permanent change.
It is not impossible to make money in retail. But you can't do it the way it was done in the past. The answer isn't as simple as "location, location, location;" or even inventory. As the new, and struggling, CEO at JC Penney has learned the hard way, it's not about "every day low price." Or even low price at all, as the former WalMart exec just fired at Supervalu learned – along with all their employees.
Today traditional retail store success requires you have unique products, unique merchandising, sales assistance that meets immediacy needs, strong trend connectivity and effective pricing. Just look at IKEA, Lululemon, Sephora, Whole Foods, Trader Joe's and PetSmart – for example.
Of course there will be grocery stores. Traditional retail will not disappear. But that doesn't mean it will be profitable. And trying to chase profits by constantly beating down costs gets you – well – Circuit City, Toys R Us, Drug Emporium, Pay N Save, Crazy Eddie, Egghead Software, Bradlee's, Korvette's, TG&Y, Wickes, Skagg's, Payless Cashways, Musicland — and Supervalu. There is more to business than price, something the vast, vast majority of retailers keep forgetting.
Fifty years ago if you wanted a TV you went to a television store where they not only sold you a TV, they repaired it! You selected from tube-based machines made by Zenith, RCA, Philco and Magnavox. The TV shop owner made some money on the TV, but he also made money on the service. And if you wanted a washer or refrigerator you went to an "appliance store" for the same reason. But the world changed, and the need for those stores disappeared. Almost none changed to what people wanted – they simply failed.
Now the world has changed again. The customer value proposition in retail is shifting from location and inventory to information. And it is extremely hard to have salespeople – or shelf tags – with comparable information to a web page, which have not only product and price info but competitive comparisons on everything. There simply isn't enough profit in a TV, stereo, PC, CD or DVD to cover the overhead of salespeople, check-out clerks, on-hand inventory and the building.
And that's why Best Buy had to shutter 50 stores in March. On its way to the same ending as Polk Brothers, Grant's Appliance and Circuit City.
Don't expect a 70 year old retailer to understand what retail markets will look like in 2020. Or anyone trained in traditional retail at Wal-Mart. Or anyone who thinks they can save a traditional "retail brand" like Sears. The world has already shifted – and those are stories from last decade (or long before.)
If you are interested in retail go where the growth is – and that is all about on-line leadership. Sell Best Buy and put your money in Amazon. You'll sleep better.
