Best Buy Ever

Best Buy is to close all its UK stores, probably by Christmas. The inevitability of this was writ large soon after they opened. Brash, unexciting and with a style that is tasteless and cheap the company moved into a crowded sector, with no USP.

The bosses are saying, 'it's OK though, we are making lots of money elsewhere', but if I were a shareholder I would be asking the people who issue such smug assertions, 'why?' Why think you can sail into the UK and be successful just because you arrive? What was missing that you provided? The idea was so hopeless they either didn't bother to check with anyone here first, or if they did it must have been someone of the calibre of Tony Blair, who just told them what they wanted to hear.

Mugged over for a lot of pounds sterling Best Buy are retreating with their tail between their legs. Comet are probably breathing a sigh of relief. I wouldn't. Comet is the British version of Best Buy, Shabby, aiming at the wrong sector, no 'stand out' offering and out of date thinking.

Bloody funny to see the PC World/Curry's ads launch majoring on customer service and then alongside a Tesco ad saying they employ specialists in their electrical department. I was nearly on the floor laughing. Tesco; pretending to be anything other than a multiple seller. Had they restyled and separated their electrical's, making it a store within a store, then perhaps the specialist staff bit might have worked.

Why does the assistant smell fishy? Not because he does dodgy deals but because he has just come from the fish counter because electrical's were short of staff. Now, did you want me to fillet that toaster? I see Tesco these days as an aggressive, soulless warehouse leading the way with the new supermarket disease of loads of supervisors running around, ordering staff about and getting in the way of customers (whilst ignoring real issues under their nose). 

So, in an upside down world, PC World don't see themselves as a specialist and Tesco do. Watch out too, for the soon to appear Christmas panic. I predict that a number of struggling retailers will soon go into overdrive trying to attract custom with ever crazier offers. If you have a good offering, stay clam, maintain your resolve and things will be OK. They may not be stupendous, but steely nerves will see you through. It is not so much what you buy and what you sell, as your philosophy. You get it right, because you think right.