Here Are The Best Buy Stores Closing First, And Why I Care

A day after electronics retailer Best Buy announced they’d be shuttering 50 big box stores as part of a new strategy to cut costs and revamp the way they sell, I gave them a quick ring to find out which stores would actually close.

See, there’s one in Danbury, Connecticut, I like to browse, and I worry it will suffer the same fate as the nearby Borders and the nearby Circuit City did, adding another ugly, weedy cavity to the local mall scene and depriving me of pretty much anything to do while waiting for a movie to start on a Saturday evening  in suburbia. (There’s only so many times you can walk the aisles at Lowes, and Amazon still isn’t nearly as entertaining as flipping through racks of DVDs or books).

I don’t really hate Best Buy, and I certainly can’t root against them. I actually kind of like the place. It’s air conditioned nicely in the summer, it’s kind of dark, it’s quiet, they have stuff that I like to look at. It’s like a library filled with toys.

Some memories are downright pleasant. My late father in law and I bought two flat-screen TVs from Best Buy one afternoon at a location in Northern Vermont. It took about 35 minutes from finding the salesman to putting them in the back my father in law’s pickup. No fuss, no muss. Nice folks. The TVs–which he’d slyly stalked through a half-decade of Sunday circulars–worked perfectly when we got them home and still do.

Maybe it’s changed since then (three years ago), but can’t say I’ve personally ever had a bad experience there. Given all the hate I see online towards this company, I actually feel that somehow I’ve missed out on some horrific retail right of passage, or maybe my expectations for shopping are just too low.

But anyway, this is clearly a company under siege. You call the special press number, you don’t get a call back. Instead, you get an email shot to you within 20 minutes with exactly what you’re looking for. Amid an acre of routine PR blather there’s this:

On Thursday, March 29, we notified employees at five stores in the Twin Cities area, and one store in the San Antonio area, that their stores will close later this year as Connected Store remodels are completed in their markets.

So what about all the other stores? No word yet:

We will announce details about additional, specific store locations and timing for closings as they are finalized.

So, fingers crossed, Danbury and Vermont. At least one person is rooting for you.