On pondering how Best Buy is going under, allegedly due to becoming Amazon’s “showroom,” I decided it’s quite the opposite. Best Buy is losing to the search engine.
How many times have you walked into a big-box store only to be completely lost and unable to find what you need? How helpful have the zombies in the blue shirts been in finding what you need? Who wants to have to hunt for a surly, clueless sales rep to help them when it’s so much easier to tell a search engine exactly what one wants and have the answer appear within seconds?
Search engines don’t hassle you with aggressive upselling, either. The now-defunct chain Circuit City used to do this and it drove me nuts. I’d have to fight off their commission-based sales associates to the point that it totally turned me off on shopping at their store. The sharks at Circuit City were the meatspace equivalent of pop-up ads.
I think big-box stores still have a chance, provided that they return to one of the time-tested methods of making customers happy: giving them what they want. Store associates should be well-versed in the products and also polite. Above all, they should be accessible. It worked for hundreds of years of retailing and it can still work – search engines and online retailers or not.
I would use amazon as a search engine and buy locally if I could actually find what I’m looking for and it was a competitive price. It doesn’t have to be the same as online, but it has to be competitive. Take a look at Barnes and Noble for instance and compare the cost to buy a book online and have it shipped and the cost to buy a book online and pick it up at the local store. It’s often 30-50% higher to do the latter! I’m not concerned about the shipping cost since I can get free shipping off amazon, but I will pay a reasonable amount extra to get something right away. Right now, though, the premium (including tax too) is not reasonable.