Today, Best Buy’s President and Chief Operating Officer called today’s sales climate the worst he’s seen in 42 years, citing that “People are making dramatic changes in how much they spend, and we’re not immune from those forces.” Indeed, we’ve already heard from an inside source that Best Buy has quietly restructured their high-end Magnolia department, reducing expenditures to pre-holiday levels and cross training the employees to work in the normal home theater department. Now an internal memo leaked by The Consumerist explains how else Best Buy plans to cope on a wider scale:
Let us be very clear. These reduced earnings expectations reflect the unprecedented tumult in the financial services industry, which has reduced consumer spending across the board in retail. The outstanding work of our 165,000 employees doesn’t make us immune to our environment. We can’t change the overall level of consumer spending, but we can focus on deepening our relationships with customers wherever we interact with them: in our stores, on our Web sites and through our call centers
You can read the entire memo over at Consumerist, but it seems to read something like “Smile! You may not be getting a bonus this year, but you might just keep your job.” [Consumerist and CNN]
