A couple near me disappeared. GPS took me to one that's now a Halloween City. The Best Buy logo imprint was still clearly visible.
Most retail businesses are closing down underperforming stores. It's not a matter of "That company won't be there in 5 years!", it's just a matter of "That area isn't high volume, and if they've already driven out any competition in the surrounding areas, there's no reason to renew that building's lease when its up". Best Buy is actually doing quite well among the non walmart/target retail giants, and is in a position to grow, unlike most others.
A huge part of retail is pushing out your competition. This offer is, truthfully, a very big example of that strategy at work. Does BB
need to do some kind of crazy offer like this free GCU deal? Absolutely not. They're not hurting for money, nor are they hurting for customers. What they see is a store that owns a large share of the market that cuts into a sector of their retail struggling, and they've got the means/funds to flush them out. This is a direct "attack" on Gamestop and their PowerUp rewards program. The powerup card is, more or less, the only major advantage Gamestop has over its competition, which is mainly target/walmart/amazon. Best Buy has had the GCU program, but setting the entry price point so high kind of walls off a huge amount of potential buyers. Best Buy's plan here is, truthfully, kinda genius. They're relying on this exact kind of publicity behind this to get it all off the ground. They want people like you, people like me, and the "slickdeals/CAG" crowd to get in on the deal. It won't be a massive amount of people that have the program, but it'll be enough people with LOUD mouths on the internet. They expect, everytime someone makes a post on a forum or website about how they hate paying 60$ for new games, to see someone who has GCU mention how they're getting games for 38$. And how they're getting better trade ins and everything else.
The theory is that the word of GCU spreads like wildfire through honest gamer-to-gamer promotion of the program. Not from register sales smackdowns on every single customer that walks into the door. It won't be something the average gamer got convinvced to buy; it'll be something the average gamer
wants, or even feels like they
need. It'll create a ton of full priced GCU members who become loyal to BestBuy through pricing, whereas Gamestop type deals will have the things like "exclusive content". Price rules all, and if Gamestop loses just 15, or even 10 percent of its "loyal" powerup customers to GCU, their whole business could crumble, because it would just snowball from there.
This is one of those things where, 4 or 5 years from now, you might not even be able to find an operating gamestop within 10 miles of a best buy location, outside of the extremely high volume areas like NYC/LA.
