The best buys in my area are getting kind of sketch in the past few years. Numerous empty shelves. Products sitting on the floors in boxes not put up for display. Wish I had a Microcenter close.
Microcenter’s commission scheme has made their sales people intolerable. Last time I was in there I had to tell no less than 6 employees I was perfectly comfortable choosing a router and DisplayPort cable without them.
I am also capable of reading the back of the box. It’s actually much easier without having employees interrupt and hover around me.
All the stores are like this now, not just Best Buy. Walmart used to be, as I remember it, this insane level of consumerism store where the shelves were overfilled and there was no product so niche that they didn't have at least a few of nearly any product you can imagine. They used to sell hard drives, for fuck's sake, even if it seems like they were locked behind the glass near the electronics checkout. Now you go in there, and it's just a wasteland. Home Depot no longer sells home improvement or hardware store goods... it tries to sell the cheap junk you'd think would be in the Walmart. There are no tools at Home Depot unless a contractor would use them. Absolutely nothing for woodworking (I seem to remember them carrying at least one display piece for a wood lathe back around 1999-2003), now there are no table saws. I often end up going with my wife or my daughter to Michael's or Hobby Lobby, the former has reduced their store inventory so much that the only way to hide it was to remove shelves and spread them thinner so that you could march a school band through the aisles without them having to step closer to each other. The latter has changed their inventory to have fewer craft supplies, and more Temu-style junk.
Caveat - I haven't gone to primary sources, but all indications are that they're doing pretty well. Increase of 1.8~% in number of store locations in the last 5 years.
Inflation adjusted, revenue is up 38% since late 2009.
Wal-Mart is similarly doing very well.
If you thought HD and WMT were dying, this may be a moment to reevaluate the heuristics you're using to gauge the health of retail businesses.
