Best Buy founder offers to buy company, take it private
August 6, 2012 at 3:45 am in Grand Forks Herald
Best Buy’s founder said Monday that he wants to take the electronics retailer private by buying up all of its shares he doesn’t already own in a deal that values the company at as much as $8.84 billion. Continue Reading
How about getting the story right? He doesn’t have the cash to buy it up. He’s trying to get other investors to pony up the rest; maybe 80%. Lord you guys are awful reporters.
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How about you read first! The Herald never wrote the article, it came from the AP! Take your grief to them not the Herald. Also, if you don’t like the herald or anything in Grand Forks, why don’t you just get the heck out of town? No one would miss you!
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So, as long as it’s an AP story, the Herald is not responsible for its accuracy? How convenient for the Herald. Maybe they should dump all their staff and run nothing but wire stories…save them a lot of grief. And as for “Grand Forks…love it or leave it” get real.
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At least this fellow is doing it the old fashion way, not asking for a “Bama Bailout”, not using taxpayer money etc, etc, etc
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Well at least he is not a bust out artist like Romney. He wants the company to continue unlike Romney who only wants to pick at the bones, raid the pension fund, borrow a bunch of money and then BK the company.
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I get the impression that all the dislikes are Best Buy employees. Too bad. The guy f’d up and is now stuck. He doesn’t seem to have a clue about what’s happened to the big box stores. They’re dead. Amazon rules. Sorry guys.
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Quite honestly I never would have progressed to amazon shopping if BB employees would actually care about their customers instead of treating them like cash cows.
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I have to put in a good word for him. Richard Schulze donated the money to build the Hope Lodge in Mpls as well as paying for an addition to the Hope Lodge in Rochester. His generosity saved me about $6,000 or more. I’m staying out of the business part of the discussion but he is a decent humanitarian. His wife died of mesothelioma quite a few years ago.
(Once again….if anybody needs a place to stay while being treated for cancer in the Twin Cities or Rochester consider staying at one of the two. You need to get a referral from your doctor which is a simple thing. It’s ran by the American Cancer Society. The facility in Mpls truly is a great place. Check it out on line.)
http://www.cancer.org/Treatment/SupportProgramsServices/HopeLodge/Minneapolis/index
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The only thing the Hope Lodge asked us to do in exchange for 8 weeks of free lodging was to get the word out about the facility. It usually runs at a 70% occupancy rate. I saw the opportunity so I took advantage of it. I didn’t mean any offense to you or maverick…that is for sure.
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Completely understand TJ..I don’t even see where you tried to offend me.
I, like Gene am not questioning his humanitarianism. My complaint with BB is the culture within their units. It has been there many many years. I have dealt with BB in both a professional and personal level during my life. On the professional level it was providing support for their performance service plans. On a personal level my last experience was when I attempted to purchase a hi-def television. It was the last time I set foot in their store.
Anyone who has set foot in their store knows what I am talking about when I say they have to be one of the worst for high pressure sales. They will try to sell you everything including the kitchen sink, even if you don’t need it. I absolutely laugh uncontrollably when I think about the last sales droid I interacted with and their television ‘calibration’ plans.
I would have to agree that a large majority of the customers that they deal with are not technical in nature. The way they take advantage of those people really makes me ill.
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The strange thing about it is that you do have these high-pressure sales personnel, who are not even on comission…the bucks flow down to Bloomington.
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Yes they tell you they don’t earn a commission. What they don’t tell you is that they get a ‘Bonus’ not a commission on how many upsells they get, and how many performance service plans they sell. All it is, is a play on words.
There isn’t a sales person in the world who will use the high pressure sales tactics that they do if there wasn’t something in it for them. And honestly just being employed in this area of the country isn’t enough. Their high pressure sales tactics have been in place ever since a company I worked for supported their computer performance service plan. The shear number of lies their sales people would tell customers in order to sell the plan could make me rich if I ever wrote a book.
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It’s like when Red Lobster servers pumped their expensive drinks and desserts for a $50 bonus at the end of the month. Used to drive me nuts, so I quit eating there. They’ve cut it out.
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I wish he would buy Duluth and run it like a business.
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It’s beginning to look as if he doesn’t want the company, we wants his 20% stake to go up by having other investors take over. That isn’t likely.
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At the point that Best Buy stops selling the bottom-of-the-barrel Chinese crap, I’ll consider buying stuff there.
As is, the last computer I got there barely made it out of warranty (lasted just long enough that I’m stuck with the piece of junk. Thanks, HP.)
Their entire “audio” department is a waste of floorspace. Some of the brand names are recognizable, but the actual products are from the “junk” end of the product line.
If it wasn’t for media–CDs and DVDs–I don’t think I’d set foot in the place; and I buy less media than I used to.
God bless Amazon.
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Notice no followup story in the Herald about how all this was just a PR ploy. He was talking a buyout at 24-26 a share, which would run into the billions. The same day analysts noted no group would pony up the other 80% needed.
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