So, I used to work at a major camera retailer in the Northeast (I’m currently laid off, but with the way commissions have been falling off in the past year, collecting unemployment has actually constituted a RAISE for me, so… hooray for that, I guess.). The problem this store faces is simply that, for it to continue to exist, they need to charge more than the major online camera/photo suppliers. Quite a bit more, in fact. When you buy a camera from Amazon, they’re charging you something like 5% above cost. My store can’t possibly exist selling cameras for those kind of margins; the problem is they’ve yet to come up with a sales model that offers the customer a good reason they should pay more to come to our store.

The era of Best Buy is over. The new model is the Apple Store. The store that says, no, we don’t have everything in the world in stock. No, we don’t have the lowest prices. What we have is a beautiful store with employees who actually have some clue as to what they’re talking about, a ton of hands on demos, training, real customer service, etc. No one questions that they’re going to have to pay more at such a store, because it’s obvious the store itself is spending a bunch of money on all this nice stuff they have. It’s not for selling everything to everyone at the lowest possible price, it’s about adding value to a particular group of customers (sounds like a certain baseball publication I gladly shell out $60 a year for, come to think of it). For the people that want to go buy a $300 Dell off Amazon… well… Apple doesn’t stand to make much money off them anyway. For someone who actually needs some help picking out a computer, they’re glad to pay a premium to get some, you know… actual help. Best Buy doesn’t offer any.

So, are the jobs we lost when Circuit City went under coming back? No, never, not gonna happen. The silver lining is that those weren’t very good jobs in the first place. So, lets see if we can’t invent some new products and services that are actually worth paying for. Let’s see if we can get those people laid off from jobs where they stood, bored, at a cash register for hours on end into a business that requires some real application of knowledge and skill, provides more for the customer than just the lowest price, and maybe, just maybe, isn’t a giant ugly box in the middle of an enormous parking lot, and we’ll be a lot better off in the long run. Our current turnips just don’t contain a whole lot more blood, I’m afraid.