[Link: hometheaterreview.com]

And the cuts begin. My first thought on this is the fact that our economy is so screwed up.

I fairly certain this is the same news from a few months ago. Not sure why this article is posting it as new.

I thought the same thing. I remember it being posted a while back but maybe now will see the layoffs.

It is dated from 10 days ago.

My thought is Best Buy lacks customer loyalty because they don't offer any advantages other than demo. Their customer service is terrible, employee knowledge below average, and their pricing isn't competitive. In this day and age you have to win clients with service and knowledge OR pricing and availability. Best Buy does neither great.

Magnolia's flagship Seattle store shut down their Custom showroom and is moving it to a suburban Best Buy. Their Seattle and Bellevue retail storaes are still open, but will be following the same path pretty soon.

A friend of mine who had worked there 30 years just quit.

30 years? that is crazy. I hate the geek squad but I don't want to see any of these stores go away with our economy. I want to see everybody doing well again.

The days of playing nice and singing kumbaya are long gone my friend. Now we're just doing what we have to do to keep putting food on the table. I doubt any of us are getting rich doing this. If you are please PM me your secret and I'll buy you a drink at CEDIA? :)

Your telling me the big boys like etc and logic integration and other real deal integrators in big cities owners aren't pulling in 250k a year personal income easy doing this? I'd say that they are doing that and then some.

Also I'm always reading no one is even advertising barely in this industry and just doing word of mouth. Imagine if u did advertise. Awareness of what's possible in this industry is so low and most people have no idea where to even go to find someone who does this work. Walk down the road and ask 40 people you pass who to call to get speakers outside installed. See what most reply. Betcha almost no one has the proper answer. Cedia needs to get of their asses and make this their main initiative IMHO. The market is barely tapped on what's possible.

This apocalyptic view of our industry is maddening to me. This industry is only a dead-end if you never turn. There are plenty of avenues of making money in this industry and plenty of clients looking for our services. I am busier than I have ever been in almost 10 years. The secret isnt a secret.... either stay focused on one product category and be the best in your market at it or diversify and have the most options in your market. Combine either of those with exceptional customer service and you will do just fine in this and any other industry.

Oh crap. Not another CEDIA advertisement discussion.

Gotta admit and a lot of people agree. Seems cedia gets more out of us then we do in return. Shell out of this cash annually to hang a logo on ur site that means dick to the public anyways becuz no one knows who cedia is.

But this is off topic. Don't even reply.

Oh we're plenty busy too, but I'm hustling harder than I ever have to keep feeding projects into the pipeline. Hardly apocalyptic, but my point was more that it's not automatic that projects just fall out of the sky and land in our laps. We're doing OK, but the "everybody wants to be a CI" thing has left a bunch of people that don't look to be doing so well.

But hey, if GS is letting people go, that makes for a nice pool of pre-trained employees for us to hire, right? (maybe some retraining required :P)

I agree on the everybody wants to be a ci and dip into our area of work thing.

Best buy cutting gs people is not a reflection on the economy . They made very bad choices and it is catching up with them . I used to work there when times were good and even then they were making bad choices . They always were changing things that cost big money for no reason . Just think how much they spent on changing from best buy to mag to geek squad clothing and truck logos . It must of been in the millions . We would drive all the way to the Bronx in traffic and back close to 3 hours to deliver a tv for $75 . Would anybody here schedule a tv deliver in NYC for 4:30 on a Friday and have 2 of your most expensive techs go in to overtime sitting in traffic for 2 hours .