• Landless2029@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    They also invested heavily into selling loads of televisions. They stocked up on TVs for the holiday season using purchase orders (basically using an IOU to pay back later), but when they were stuck with all thier unsold stock they folded since they couldn’t pay those bills.

    Oh and Best Buy owes its survival to investing heavily into cell phone plans and contracts. They would’ve folded without it.

    Even now they get lots of company kickbacks from Sony, Samsung, Apple, Sonos, etc to be a showroom for stuff.

    • booly@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      Oh and Best Buy owes its survival to investing heavily into cell phone plans and contracts. They would’ve folded without it.

      Radio Shack limped along for maybe a decade after their core business stopped making sense, because of their cell phone deals. This Onion article from 2007 captures the cultural place that RadioShack operated in at the time, and they didn’t file bankruptcy until 2015 (and then reorganized and filed bankruptcy again in 2017).

      • ATDA@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Worked there in the mid '00s and oh my God did they never shut the fuck up about selling those same 5 phones and plans ugh.

        I wanted to work in an OG RadioShack not a shack with shitty radios.

    • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Especially Samsung, and especially Samsung appliances.

      Samsung’s appliance division would probably be completely dead to consumers by now if it weren’t for the fact that they bribe Best Buy to put their stuff front and center in the showroom.