That was already when that industry hit the downhill slide.

I started in this industry doing Directv. Employee piecework rates when I started were $80 for dish and 1st box, 35 for each additional with company supplied materials. Could do 3-4 a day if you hustled.
Next place I worked was an AV company that was a DTV dealer, they paid $100/$45 slingin dishes on houses they had prewired. Talk about easy money.

When I finally threw in the towel on doing dishes, the going rate was $50/$15 and that was for the much bigger dishes. Yeah....No. I met a guy getting $35/10 at a jobsite I was working on. Guy barely spoke English, was driving a battered Nissan Altima with ladders strapped to the roof and while a nice guy, had no clue how to do his job.

Funny that Best Buy is taking the approach of "we can't make money doing the jobs ourselves so we will sub them out for even less money".