Best Buy to Reopen 800 Stores, Call Back 9,000 Furloughed Staff
Best Buy Co., Inc. BBY has announced the reopening of its stores safely. Effective Jun 15, more than 800 stores in the United States will allow a restricted number of customers without any appointment. As part of the social-distancing practice, the company will limit the number of customers inside the stores to 25% of capacity, equivalent to roughly 60 or more customers in a store based on the size. Moreover, stores will have floor signage in order to aid customers and employees maintain six feet of distance. In addition, management announces to bring back more than 9,000 of the furloughed full- and part-time store staff and Geek Squad Agents.
Best Buy’s other safety guidelines include necessary self-health assessments with temperature checks, employees and customers wearing protective gear, frequent sanitization within the store, and acrylic shields at checkout counters. It has also announced dedicated shopping hours for elderly and vulnerable customers. Apart from these, the company will start resuming in-home consultations, which are being conducted virtually since March.
Meanwhile, the company will continue to offer curbside pickup and in-store consultations. In the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, Best Buy proactively shifted to a contactless curbside-only operating model for all domestic stores on a temporary basis. This helped the company retain nearly 80% of last year’s sales in the last six weeks of first-quarter fiscal 2021 despite store closures. Impressively, customer satisfaction scores for curbside pickup remained robust and Best Buy witnessed domestic online growth of 155.4% to $3.34 billion during the first quarter of fiscal 2021. As a percentage of overall Domestic revenues, online revenues grew to 42.2% compared with 15.4% in the prior-year quarter.
Notably, Best Buy is focused on improving the buy online, pickup in store services. Moreover, the company has been innovating digital experiences to resonate well with customer needs online and physical shopping through curbside pickup and the in-store consultation process. Its ‘Building the New Blue’ strategy has also been progressing smoothly.
Price Performance & Zacks Rank
A glimpse of Best Buy’s price performance shows that its shares are down 6.1% year to date compared with the industry’s 20% decline.
The company currently has a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell).
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