For millions of Americans, the big blue box with the yellow price-tag logo is more than just a store—it’s a cultural landmark. Best Buy has been the place where generations bought their first Walkman, their first flat-screen TV, their first gaming console, and, more recently, their first smart refrigerator. At its peak in the late 2000s, Best Buy was the undisputed king of consumer electronics retail in the United States, with more than 1,400 stores, $50 billion in annual revenue, and a market capitalization that briefly topped $30 billion. Then Amazon happened. And smartphones happened. And the entire retail landscape imploded.
Today, in 2025, Best Buy is a very different company—smaller, nimbler, and surprisingly resilient. It has closed hundreds of stores, embraced e-commerce, pivoted hard into services, and somehow managed to remain relevant in an era when most people buy electronics with one-click checkout on their phones. This is the story of how Best Buy went from near-death to cautious optimism, and what it tells us about the future of physical retail.
The Origin Story: From Sound of Music to Big-Box Dominance
Best Buy didn’t start as a big-box electronics chain. It began in 1966 as a small audio specialty store called Sound of Music in St. Paul, Minnesota, founded by Richard Schulze and a partner. The company grew slowly through the 1970s, focusing on high-end stereo equipment for audiophiles. The turning point came in 1981 when a tornado destroyed the Roseville, Minnesota, store. Instead of rebuilding as another boutique audio shop, Schulze took the insurance money and opened a new, much larger store focused on discounted electronics with a warehouse-style layout. He called it “Best Buy” and adopted the now-iconic yellow tag logo.
The concept was simple but revolutionary at the time: stack inventory high, cut prices low, train employees to actually know what they were selling, and let customers touch and demo everything. By 1984, the company had nine stores and $240 million in sales. In 1985, it went public. By 1989, Best Buy invented the “Concept II” superstore format—no commissioned salespeople, huge selection, self-service checkout lanes—and began a nationwide expansion that crushed regional competitors like Circuit City, The Good Guys, and Highland Superstores.
The 1990s and early 2000s were Best Buy’s golden age. The company rode wave after wave of new technology—VHS, CD players, DVD, home theater systems, digital cameras, flat-panel TVs, smartphones—and became the default destination for anyone who wanted to see, touch, and compare gadgets before buying. Geek Squad, acquired in 2002, turned tech support into a profitable service business. By 2008, Best Buy was bigger than Walmart in consumer electronics sales in the United States.
The Dark Years: Showrooming and the Amazon Apocalypse
Consumers suddenly had powerful computers in their pockets. Price-comparison apps appeared. Amazon invested billions into logistics and Prime. Best Buy stores became expensive showrooms where people browsed products, scanned barcodes with their phones, and ordered the same item online for less. The industry even gave it a name: showrooming.
Between 2010 and 2015, Best Buy’s stock crashed from nearly $50 to under $12. Same-store sales declined for years. Circuit City went bankrupt in 2009. RadioShack followed in 2015. Analysts openly speculated that Best Buy would be next. The company closed hundreds of stores, laid off thousands of employees, and saw multiple CEOs come and go.
In 2012, founder Richard Schulze attempted a leveraged buyout to take the company private, but the board rejected it. That same year, French executive Hubert Joly—an outsider with no retail background—was named CEO. Most people thought he was there to manage the inevitable bankruptcy.
The Joly Turnaround: “Renew Blue” and the Art of Survival
Hubert Joly’s strategy, dubbed “Renew Blue,” was equal parts ruthless cost-cutting and surprisingly bold reinvention. He did five big things that saved the company:
Price-matching Amazon. In 2013, Best Buy began matching online prices, including Amazon’s, year-round. It hurt margins, but it stopped showrooming in its tracks.
Vendor “store-within-a-store” partnerships. Samsung, Sony, Microsoft, Apple, and later Google and Amazon all opened branded mini-stores inside Best Buy locations. The vendors paid for the space and staffing, giving Best Buy essentially free high-quality labor and instant credibility.
Massive investment in employee training. Geek Squad agents became legitimate consultants rather than up-selling machines. The famous blue-shirted floor staff were given iPads and real-time pricing tools.
Supply-chain overhaul. Best Buy started using many of its stores as mini-distribution centers for online orders, enabling same-day delivery in many markets—something Amazon still struggles with for large items like 75-inch TVs.
A cultural reset. Joly famously spent his first week working undercover on the sales floor. He slashed executive perks, froze his own salary, and convinced employees that the company could survive if everyone pulled together.
The results were stunning. By 2017, same-store sales were growing again. The stock recovered. Joly became a business-school case study.
The Corie Barry Era: From Survival to (Cautious) Growth
In 2019, Hubert Joly stepped down and handed the CEO role to Corie Barry, Best Buy’s former CFO and the youngest female CEO of a Fortune 500 company at the time. Barry inherited a stabilized but still vulnerable retailer. Her strategy, “Building the New Blue,” has focused on three pillars:
- Health and home technology (fitness equipment, home office, telehealth devices, smart appliances)
- Services and subscriptions (Totaltech membership, Geek Squad protection plans)
- Experiential retail
The COVID-19 pandemic was paradoxically the best thing that ever happened to Best Buy’s turnaround. Locked-down consumers went on a buying spree for laptops, monitors, webcams, and home entertainment. Best Buy’s curbside pickup and ship-from-store infrastructure—built during the Joly years—worked flawlessly when most competitors were scrambling. Revenue hit an all-time high of $52 billion in fiscal 2021.
Best Buy in 2025: Smaller, Smarter, and Still Standing
As of late 2025, Best Buy operates about 1,000 stores in North America—down from 1,400 at its peak—but many of the remaining locations have been remodeled into “experiential” formats. You can now test Peloton bikes, play the latest Xbox on a 120-inch screen, or have a Geek Squad agent set up your entire smart home in a mock living room.
The company’s Totaltech membership program (launched in 2021 and rebranded Best Buy Beta in 2024) has more than 6 million paying members who get free delivery, installation, 24/7 tech support, and exclusive discounts. Services now account for roughly 8% of revenue but a much higher share of profit.
Best Buy has also quietly become one of the largest resellers of electric vehicle home-charging equipment and solar/battery systems through partnerships with Tesla, ChargePoint, and Enphase.
Financially, the company is healthy but not flashy. Revenue has settled around $45–48 billion, with mid-single-digit e-commerce growth and stable (if unspectacular) profitability. The stock trades around $90–$100, giving it a market cap of roughly $22 billion—respectable, but far from its 2006 peak.
The Future: Can Best repurchase Outrun Obsolescence?
Best Buy’s most significant long-term challenge is simple: most of the products it sells are becoming commoditized, low-margin, or both. TVs, laptops, and phones have razor-thin margins. The real money is in services, subscriptions, and high-growth categories like health tech and home energy.
The company is betting heavily on the “connected home” and “connected fitness” markets, as well as an aging population that wants tech support. It has also begun selling Medicare-eligible health-monitoring devices and has partnered with hospitals for remote patient monitoring programs.
There are risks. Amazon continues to dominate online, Apple is increasingly selling direct, and Chinese brands like Hisense and TCL are eating into appliance margins. Labor costs remain high, and the traditional big-box real estate model is expensive.
Yet Best Buy has one advantage its pure-play online competitors lack: physical space where people can see, touch, and experience technology. In an age of AI assistants and augmented reality, that still matters—especially for expensive or complicated products.
Conclusion
Best Buy should have died a decade ago. Instead, it executed one of the most impressive turnarounds in modern retail history, transforming from a dinosaur into a hybrid retailer-services company that actually makes sense in 2025.
It will never again be the unstoppable juggernaut of the early 2000s. But it doesn’t need to be. Today’s Best Buy is proof that physical retail isn’t dead—it’s just evolving. As long as there are people who want to see an 85-inch TV in person before spending three thousand dollars, or grandparents who need someone to set up their new iPad and teach them how to FaceTime the grandkids, there will be a place for those big blue boxes.
The yellow tag is faded, the store count is smaller, and the aisles are quieter than they used to be. But Best Buy is still here. And in retail, survival is the ultimate victory.
