Shopping News: Best Buy laying off 5000, closing more stores

We have more breaking shopping news, this time the subject is Best Buy, but the good news is that they are not having same fate as Fry’s Electronics as we previously mentioned. Speaking of Fry’s, if you now go to the Fry’s website you will read their “after nearly 36 years in business…” letter, with guidance on what to do if you have anything pending with them (repairs, consignments, credit balances, etc)… The benefit of them having had their service contracts and credit cards ran by other companies comes in handy now that Fry’s is going away…

So to Best Buy now. The company has announced it is laying off 5000 (five thousand) employees and will close more stores than previously anticipated. COVID and overall trends and all, their online sales are now 40% of their total ~ this number doubled since two years ago.

More details and discussion on the Best Buy news via Techmeme

Considering the Fry’s and Best Buy news, this is a good time to do an inventory of your gift cards (physical or electronic or store credits or rewards balances) at various brick and mortar and online retailers and consider the risk situation of each retailer whose gift card you have. Amazon and Walmart and Starbucks and such may be too big to fail, but others may not be so lucky…