‘Why Best Buy is Going out of Business…Gradually’

Larry Downes has a fine — very fine — critique of Best Buy’s many problems online at Forbes. Five solid, well-written and well-reasoned pages in which he takes apart the practices and supposed strategy of a mediocre retailer.

As a business critique, it’s top-notch.

Yet, Downes’s critique is even more useful: think ‘local government’ instead of Best Buy, and some of the observations about poor service, narrow perspective, and excuse-making still apply.

This observation, particularly, comes to mind, about how customers understand the Internet better than a retailer like Best Buy:

More than a decade ago, in “Unleashing the Killer App,” I wrote that while transitioning to the Internet was revolutionary for retailers, it was merely evolutionary for customers. “Ensure continuity for the customer,” I said as one of my twelve rules for building killer apps, “not yourself.”

What I meant was that consumers easily adapt to alternative retail channels. Before the Internet, there was catalog shopping and home shopping from television. For consumers, buying online was just the next step in an obvious progression of more convenient ways to buy.

For brick-and-mortar retailers, however, the shift was jarring. Moving online required new thinking, new management structures, and new strategies. It would also require integrated front and back-end information systems. Customers would expect inventory to be transparent between the web and the stores, and that specials and “exclusives” would be consistent across all channels. Whatever attributes they associated with a retailer’s brand—whether price, quality, convenience, expertise, service—would need to be translated to the online experience and enhanced.

Just as customers were ahead of slower-thinking brick-and-mortar retailers, so people are ahead of middling, stodgy politicians and dull, lapdog newspapers. The outlook in local government is mostly about what the politician is owed, what he’s achieved, his role as pillar of the community, etc., but talk of service is just lip service.

For example, the average resident is more capable than the average city bureaucrat realizes. Small cities are teeming with thousands and thousands of people whose production exceeds that of those who’ve spent a lifetime insisting on their own importance as career manager-visionaries.

Why?

It’s a mentality borne of complacency – so many contemporary local officials grew up in easier times, when they could do what they wanted, knowing the only news would be fawning, each story a valentine to incumbents and town squires. They came into their careers coddled, expecting (and really wanting) to receive others’ deference. They’ve not been tested and have not developed as much as residents in countless other jobs. But they don’t see that they haven’t, or don’t want to see it.

It’s not intellect, but rather perspective, that’s lacking.

If social and political conditions hadn’t changed when they did, or if they’d only retired sooner, leaders would have not been left in circumstances for which they’re ill-suited. But conditions have changed, and not everyone has adapted.

Just as Best Buy probably won’t make it much longer, a whole generation of local leaders will inevitably retire to be replaced with those better-suited to these times.

See, Why Best Buy is Going out of Business…Gradually – Forbes.