Best Buy

When customers started using Best Buy stores as Amazon showrooms, the company faced an existential crisis. CEO Hubert Joly's counterintuitive decision to embrace showrooming rather than fight it produced one of the most dramatic turnarounds in retail history, sending stock from $11 to over $60 in five years.

Best Buy spent over $1.3 billion buying its way into home health, betting Geek Squad's install skill was a moat. Then it took a $475 million impairment, booked $109 million in restructuring charges, and sold Current Health back to its own founder in 2025.

The legend says Best Buy disintermediated its suppliers. The truth runs the other way: it killed commissioned selling in 1989, won bargaining power over manufacturers, and today five suppliers still control roughly 55% of everything it buys.

In 2013 Best Buy made price-matching Amazon a permanent policy and was hailed for saving itself. But matching Amazon crushed its margin from 25.1% to 22.4%. The real save was the over $1 billion it cut — in annualized savings under Renew Blue — to survive the wound it chose to open.

In 2012 Best Buy was the showroom where 71% of browsers walked out and bought from Amazon. The turnaround everyone calls 'fighting Amazon' was the opposite: Joly stopped fighting price, used the threat as leverage, and turned the enemy's own suppliers into landlords.