Best Buy Geek Squad employees report mass layoffs
theverge.com
theverge.com
Before 2020, there was a big focus on Geek Squad membership sales (Total Tech Support) as they saw the $200 yearly subscription as almost free money. They were paying the Geek Squad anyways, and there was no material cost to us providing service, so that increased both customer loyalty and revenue. It’s a great service model, until one of two things happens: 1) you’ve sold the service to almost everyone who can utilize it, or 2) a global pandemic breaks loose.
As it turns out, both of those happened around the same time. (This is not based on any internal numbers, just anecdotal experience when it became increasingly harder to sell TTS as most people either had it already or didn’t need it.)
In 2020, there was a corporate shift to focus on the Best Buy website, which really felt like the nail in the coffin to the store.
My old store is a ghost town now. Horribly understaffed. I took my mom there to buy a Macbook and we were all but standing with $1.5k clenched in our fists and nobody came out to take it: not because the employees are lazy, but because there were no employees.
Every passing year that Best Buy hasn’t been liquidated is a surprise and achievement.
Best Buy no longer focuses on stocking products. I used to have a rule not to go online if I can go in person to a store. Not anymore.
Amazon has something these stores do not. Stock.
After that experience, I swore I would never buy a product from Best Buy ever again. Online, in person, doesn't matter. Permanently gone as a customer.
The corporate mindset is “let’s cut costs and let the people working at customer service/Geek Squad/the sales floor take the blame from angry customers for our streamlining.”
They did not have the expertise to compete with Amazon. They never paid the Amazon wages, or made the Amazon offices. They never had the presence in schools like Amazon did, or the prestige. I guess MBAs missed that when suddenly every single physical store _had_ to have an online presence that was given priority compared to their physical counterpart.
Wait, Best Buy is pivoting to healthcare? Yes, they are.[1] It's basically a call center operation, plus some home gadgets.
9M Geek Squad visits every year 7.1M Caring Center calls per year 30K Patients managed
So each patient is calling ~237 times per year and being visited ~300 times per year? That seems crazy high numbers
I could still see 237 calls a year when you’re dealing with personalized home healthcare for the elderly, depending on conditions.
Everyone realized it was a non-starter and no one but the most unscrupulous associates really sold from that angle.
Famous last words, stated one month before HP/Dell/Lenovo/Asus/Samsung launch the first Arm-Qualcomm laptops with UEFI, upstream Linux and Windows 11 support, including "AI" silicon and optional LTE modems. Hopefully they will be competitive in performance-per-watt with Apple M3, minus the walled garden.
Especially these days if you get .net, electron and basic winapi working, that's a huge amount of office/productivity apps covered.
Best Buy customers will understand battery life, performance and shiny "AI" features, thanks to Microsoft marketing.
You clearly never witnessed Qualcomm's MO. They're the kings of manufacturing proprietary bullshit standards paralel to the open ones, closed firmware blobs and providing next to no Linux support.
If this is what the PC future looks like, you can keep your ARM laptops, I'll gladly stick to ye' olde X86, where I can plug in a USB stick and install any OS I want without worries.
They have publicly promised upstream Linux support for Elite X at launch.
> I'll gladly stick to ye' olde X86, where I can plug in a USB stick and install any OS I want without worries.
We'll find out soon if these new Arm laptops can bridge that compatibility gap thanks to UEFI and Arm SystemReady.
We don't need to declare defeat before the starter gun has even been fired.
By several accounts, Apple is about to allow 1TB/$2000 iPad Pros to run MacOS VMs, which will likely expose silicon support for nested virtualization that can run Linux and other Arm VMs. Despite silicon support shipping for years in iPads, Apple has refused customer requests to enable VMs on iPads. Until 2024, where Apple delayed iPad Pro OLED launch to May 6th, ahead of Qualcomm/MS May 20th launch of Surface Pro with Windows 11 + Linux VMs.
It's a bizarre world where Qualcomm+Microsoft can offer the least-closed Arm laptop to run multiple bare-metal and virtualized operating systems, but here we are. If Qualcomm and PC OEMs can push Apple to be more open, all customers will benefit. If enough customers buy PC Arm laptops for OS flexibility and performance-per-watt of battery life, the revenue and OEM/customer pressure may push Qualcomm into a less-closed direction.
And virtualization works just fine in x86 land. Even GPU virtualization is supported by intel iGPU.
Qualcomm has a $30B+ pipeline in the growing vehicle market, they don't need to squeeze the declining laptop CPU sector. They can sell overpriced modems in PC laptops/tablets. The next hardware market is dedicated "AI" silicon, with Microsoft's "AI PC" roadmap requiring 40 TOPS on client devices, which Qualcomm is eager to provide and conveniently aligns with their automotive pipeline.
I rather they give us real programming manuals instead of poorly commented Linux code that diddles a black box.
Linux inst the only OS out there.
say no more https://semiaccurate.com/2023/09/26/whats-going-on-with-qual...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37709270
(it may or may not be true, semiaccurate's track record is... "checkered", and afaik reports were this doesn't seem to have shipped in the final product, but the fact that it's even a question...)
Sunlight is a good disinfectant.
We need more tech journalists to shine light on pre-production supply chains, early enough to improve GA hardware.
Did they have a lot of business contracts? If not, I don’t know how they’ve even hung on this long.
If you have enough money to have the space for a desk with a keyboard, monitor, and screen, the cost of a dedicated computer to plug into it isn't going to be an obstacle. I think this is the reason we haven't seen docking take off.
Geek Squad is not IT support for businesses, it's IT support for consumers. Consumers definitely have had computer usage/necessity displaced by phones. Many consumers will now only have a computer through their work or school, and those will have their own IT.
very true, my kids and wife dont really email enough to need a keyboard, just message or app messages, banking and watching videos and shopping all done on phone or MAYBE tablet. Cloud stores all the photos and documents. You can do your taxes on the phone, which is probably the most complicated “home” task majority of people do.
I know some older people who don't work with computers at all and just have mobile phones but they don't do anything important on them and instead continue doing those things by phone and dead tree mail for the most part.
Consider from the perspective of an average, non-technical person - someone who has never installed an OS or opened the case.
Their $900, 3-year old system "breaks". It'll cost $100 to diagnose, and anywhere from tens to hundreds to fix. Is it worth it? They're going to consider just buying a new $900 system, which will be faster and back under warranty again.
While a broken tv could be a $0.50 capacitor, the shame is a huge number of "broken" computers are purely software problems: sometimes malware, sometimes fixed by updating a driver, or even just changing a setting (And of course also "fixed" by paving over and installing a new OS).
This isn't hard to learn, but understandably people don't have the time or desire. And the value-risk-cost balance is off when compared to buying new. So perfectly good hardware becomes e-waste.
I want to to qualify that as: "There isn't much repair to be done anymore at geek squad." Computer/cellphone repair is still alive. For example, pretty much anyone with some time on their hands and access to youtube can do cellphone screen replacements. I've personally replaced the screen on my phones 4 times, and the battery once, all without any training or past experience. Laptops are even easier since you don't have to pry a screen off.
Top level response by Animats says "50 minutes ago" but is timestamped 4/7 [1]. Although top level response by theboogieman says "5 minutes ago" and does seem to be [more] correct, with a timestamp of 4/8 17:12 UTC [2]. Really shakes me up on the accuracy of comments/metadata.
Turns out it wasn't deja vu after all and I really had seen this post before.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39958754 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39971752
I just had my refrigerator fixed last year - the repair cost $500, and I think there are only three or four major parts that the technician can repair/replace. I think it's similar for a washer/dryer. It can be diagnosed and fixed expensively, or not at all and must be replaced.
The average computer is a mess of random hardware components and bad drivers and questionable-quality software that all interact with each other in unknown, disastrous ways. The YouTube channels Linus Tech Tips and Gamers Nexus have a bunch of videos in where they purposefully unplug or disable something on brand new computers, contact the tech support of the manufacturer, an independent shop, or Best Buy to have them try and fix it. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.
Your refrigerator could have had a bad relay or a bad capacitor, but they most likely just replaced the whole "control board" because that is just a couple of screws and a couple of cable connections. No diagnosis beyond "something is wrong on the board" and takes the tech about 5 minutes to do.
Let's say you have a desktop computer, power supply goes out. $100 for the part, and $100 for the tech to replace it, for a total of $200. You might think, "that computer is 3 years old, it's not even worth $200, just buy a new one".
However, a new computer comes with more costs. You have to set up all your software. Configure your web browser, bookmarks, desktop icons, setup your printer, find that program you were using to do X, this might take a whole day to do. Some people just want it fixed so they can get back to work.
but even more than hardware: software! the amount of stuff that horse wearing on people's devices with iCloud and other consumer software services is mindboggling.
So what happened to all the independent small businesses? Is there simply not a need? Or is there an opportunity here for a bunch of college kids to put some vinyl graphics on their cars and create their own local equivalent of geek squad? it honestly seems like rape territory, especially in an age where people are less and less connected to the technicalities of their devices, peripherals, etc.
Honestly, I have no idea how anyone makes money anymore.
I was there when someone balked at getting their Samsung A-series repaired. For a few dollars more they could buy another one.
And as a programmer, you'll never have to explain to someone who's struggling financially that you can't get back their lost family photos, but you're charging them $150 anyway.
Individuals have a much lower ROI from getting IT support. It's expensive to diagnose and fix "why is my computer running slow". And often times the answer is to upgrade your computer. It can be hard to stomach someone charging you an hour of labor for that.