It was announced this morning that Best Buy and target have reportedly ended their test partnership, which placed Best Buy’s Geek Squad staff at 29 Target stores in Denver and Minneapolis, as reported by the Minneapolis Star.
According to the article on the Minneapolis Star Web site, the program focused on various products, such as mobile phones, MP3 players and home theatre systems.
For the last year or so, Best Buy has remained in the headlines, not for its stellar stock prices or quarterly revenues. The company last year announced that Brian Dunn, its longtime CEO stepped down, after more than 25 years with the big-box electronics retailer. It was later discovered, after an internal investigation ordered by Best Buy’s board, that Dunn violated Company policy by engaging in an extremely close personal relationship with a female employee that negatively impacted the work environment.
Once the drama passed, a search committee was hired to seek out a new CEO, and Best Buy announced this past summer that Hubert Joly would be Dunn’s replacement, following a slew of interim CEOs.
According to the Minneapolis Star article, the announcement regarding the Geek Squad/Target break up is not a surprise, since Joly has been focusing most of his efforts on repairing Best Buy’s internal operations, which largely comprises the company’s $51 billion in annual sales.
Even though this partnership between Geek Squad and Target has dissolved, the tech crew is still present within the channel, which it entered about one year ago via announcement at the Channel Partners Conference & Expo. Shortly thereafter, the company announced it had signed on its first group of channel partners.
That being said, could GeekSquad be pulling away from retail and focusing more on the channel and MSPs???
