I hazz a lafter.

From one of the comments on the article you linked:

"i have been in furniture stores with more excitement."

Box retail stores seem to be an niche where once you get a bad reputation for customer service and/or product quality, it's really hard to turn things around. Office Max, Comp USA and Builder's Square are three over the past decade that have fallen by the wayside, and Circuit City looks to be greasing their own skids to head in that direction (though I've heard some customer service horror stories about Best Buy over the years as well, but their wider variety of items may provide some cushion from customer anger in one specific area).

John, I think that what Best Buy has going for it right now is a bunch of incompetent competitors. In other words, it's the only game in town for mass market consumer electronics.

Having said that, I have to admit that my personal experiences at Best Buy have been on the whole fairly positive, and in some cases very positive. However, I make it a point to get educated about what I'm looking for before going in, because I'm skeptical of the technical expertise (in certain areas) of some of the sales force. (That was pretty diplomatic, wasn't it?)

And it's written in English, not Hebrew or Greek! That's got to be a plus.

Well, unless you're, you know, Hebrew or Greek. ;-)

Eric, Fry's really puts Best Buy to shame -- their north Austin store has a far more knowledgeable sales force, on consumer electronic, computers (PC and Mac) and appliances. Unfortunately, they seem to also have a threshhold of about a 400,000 metro area population and certain average household income levels that has to be met before they'll locate a store there, which means the nearest stores to Midland are in Dallas and Austin.

Best Buy on the other hand, has opened up mini-outlets in certain locations with smaller population basis -- not quite as sharp a difference as Wal-Mart's mini-SuperCenters are to the full-sized ones in Midland-Odessa, but about a third less space than Best Buy's Midland outlet. So the company seems to be aware that there's a market out there for electronics/computers/appliances in smaller market-smaller income places, and you're right that in those areas, they really don't have any serious competition.