Best Buy: Surviving the Showroom

By the early 2010s, Amazon had turned Best Buy stores into free showrooms: customers walked in, handled the product, then bought it cheaper online. The stock cratered, leadership churned, and analysts had the obituary drafted. Then Hubert Joly took over as CEO in 2012 and launched a turnaround that pointedly refused to out-Amazon Amazon, betting instead on what a physical store and a service arm could do that a website could not.

For any operator facing a cheaper, faster, digital-native competitor, this case sharpens the decision every incumbent eventually confronts: which fights to pick and which to refuse. It pushes you to inventory the assets a pure-digital rival cannot easily replicate, and to be honest about where you are spending energy competing on dimensions where you are structurally disadvantaged. How Best Buy actually rewired its relationship with suppliers and customers is the move to discover inside.