The Day Best Buy Stopped Fighting Amazon
How CEO Hubert Joly turned 'showrooming' from a threat into a strategy — and saved the company.
At a Glance
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.
The Strategic Fork
$11.32
Stock Price at Decision
NYSE closing price when Joly became CEO in August 2012
1,400+
Stores at Risk
Big-box locations hemorrhaging foot traffic to online competitors
30%
Amazon Threat Level
Percentage of in-store shoppers actively showrooming with smartphones
36 months
Turnaround Time
Time from Joly's appointment to consistent positive same-store sales growth
Best Buy's Stock Journey: From Crisis to Comeback
2010
Peak Before the Fall
Best Buy stock trades above $40. The company is the undisputed king of consumer electronics retail, but Amazon's shadow is growing.
2011
Showrooming Goes Mainstream
Smartphones reach mass adoption. The term 'showrooming' enters the business lexicon as analysts warn of Best Buy's vulnerability. Stock drops below $30.
2012
The Crisis and the Fork
CEO Brian Dunn resigns. Founder Richard Schulze attempts a buyout. Stock craters to $11.32. Hubert Joly is hired as CEO and launches 'Renew Blue,' choosing to embrace showrooming rather than fight it.
2013
Price Matching Launches
Best Buy rolls out nationwide price matching against Amazon and other online retailers. Employee training programs are overhauled. Store-within-a-store concepts debut with Samsung and Windows.
2014
Early Signs of Recovery
Online sales surge. Ship-from-store capabilities roll out across the fleet. Stock climbs past $35 as analysts begin upgrading their outlook.
2015
Renew Blue Delivers
Same-store sales growth turns sustainably positive. Best Buy's in-home advisory service launches, extending the store experience into customers' living rooms.
2017
Vindication
Stock surpasses $60. Best Buy is recognized as one of the great retail turnaround stories. Amazon partners with Best Buy to sell Fire TV Edition smart TVs — the former rival becomes a vendor.
The spring of 2012 was Best Buy's darkest hour. In April, CEO Brian Dunn resigned after an internal investigation into an inappropriate relationship with a female employee. Within weeks, founder and chairman Richard Schulze — who had failed to report the relationship to the board — also stepped down. Schulze then launched a $24 billion leveraged buyout attempt that dragged on for months, creating paralyzing uncertainty. The stock, already battered by showrooming fears and declining comparable store sales, plunged to $11.32 by mid-August. Analysts openly debated whether Best Buy would follow Circuit City into bankruptcy. The board's decision to hire Hubert Joly — a hospitality and technology services executive with zero retail experience — was met with widespread disbelief. But it was precisely Joly's outsider perspective that allowed him to see what insiders couldn't: the stores weren't Best Buy's problem. They were its greatest untapped asset.
Signal
- ●62% of in-store shoppers used their phones to compare prices while browsing
- ●Amazon Prime had surpassed 20 million members and was accelerating
- ●Best Buy stores still drew 1.4 billion customer visits per year — massive foot traffic
- ●Customers overwhelmingly preferred to see, touch, and test electronics before purchasing
- ●Online return rates ran 3x higher than in-store, suggesting physical retail had inherent value
Noise
- ●Block or jam cell phone signals inside stores
- ●Compete with Amazon purely on price — race to the bottom
- ●It's just a cyclical recession — things will bounce back on their own
- ●Showrooming is a fad that will pass as novelty wears off
- ●Cut costs aggressively without fundamentally changing the business model
Hubert Joly
CEO, Best Buy (2012–2019)
Radical Candor
Joly was brutally honest about Best Buy's problems from day one, telling employees and investors that the company needed fundamental change — not incremental fixes. He publicly acknowledged that Best Buy had been losing to Amazon and refused to sugarcoat the crisis.
Customer Obsession
Rather than starting with spreadsheets, Joly spent his first month visiting stores and talking to customers. He discovered that customers valued the in-store experience more than Best Buy realized — they just didn't want to pay a premium for it.
Humble Learning
Despite being a seasoned CEO, Joly worked the sales floor in a blue shirt during his first weeks. He listened to frontline employees who understood the showrooming problem better than any consultant. This humility earned him credibility with a demoralized workforce.
Long-Term Vision
Joly resisted pressure for quick wins through massive layoffs or store closures. Instead, he invested in employees, technology, and the customer experience — moves that took time to pay off but created sustainable competitive advantages.
Culture of Denial
Many long-tenured executives believed showrooming was a temporary problem and resisted the idea that Best Buy needed to fundamentally reinvent itself. 'We've survived challenges before' was a common refrain.
Vendor Contracts Preventing Price Matching
Existing agreements with major vendors like Samsung, Sony, and LG included pricing structures that made it financially punishing to match Amazon's prices. Renegotiating these deals was a complex, months-long process.
Demoralized Store Employees
Years of cost-cutting and negative press had crushed employee morale. Store associates felt like they were working for a sinking ship. Turnover was high and engagement was at historic lows.
Legacy IT Systems Disconnected from Online
Best Buy's in-store and online systems operated as separate silos. Inventory wasn't shared, pricing wasn't synchronized, and the ship-from-store capability that would become central to the strategy didn't exist yet.
Board Skepticism About a Non-Retail CEO
Several board members and major investors questioned whether a hospitality executive could fix a consumer electronics retailer. The ongoing Schulze buyout attempt added political complexity to every strategic decision.
Inside the War Room
Joly's First 30 Days: 30+ Store Visits
Instead of holing up in the Minneapolis headquarters, Joly hit the road. He visited more than 30 Best Buy stores in his first month, working the sales floor in a blue polo shirt, talking to customers, and listening to employees. These visits gave him the ground truth that no McKinsey report could: customers loved the stores — they just hated the prices.
The 'Renew Blue' Whiteboard Session
In a pivotal strategy session, Joly and his leadership team mapped out the entire customer journey on a whiteboard. They identified every point where Best Buy was losing customers to Amazon and asked a radical question: 'What if we stopped trying to prevent showrooming and started designing for it?' This session produced the core pillars of Renew Blue.
The Minnesota Store Employee Insight
During a store visit in Minnesota, a veteran employee told Joly something that crystallized the strategy: 'Customers don't come here because they have to. They come because they want to hold the product, ask questions, and walk out with it today. We just need to stop punishing them with higher prices for doing that.' This insight became the emotional core of the turnaround narrative.
The Amazon Price-Matching Announcement
In October 2012, Best Buy announced it would match prices from Amazon and other major online retailers during the holiday season. Wall Street was skeptical — wouldn't this destroy margins? But the move eliminated the primary reason customers were showrooming, and the increased conversion rate more than offset the margin compression. The seasonal program became permanent in March 2013.
Immediate Aftermath
Stock surged 50% within Joly's first year as CEO
Price matching launched nationwide, eliminating the showrooming incentive
Employee morale rebounded as Joly invested in training and empowerment
The online experience was overhauled with a unified commerce platform
Long-Term Ripple
Online sales grew at a 25% compound annual growth rate from 2012 to 2017
Ship-from-store and in-store pickup became key competitive advantages against Amazon
Amazon became a retail partner — Best Buy sold Amazon Fire TV Edition televisions in-store
Stock rose from $11.32 to over $60 by December 2017, a 430% increase
“Best Buy didn't beat Amazon by fighting them. They won by turning their stores from a liability into an asset. The critical masterstroke was asking: 'What do we have that Amazon doesn't?' The answer was 1,400 showrooms.”
Successful Strategic Pivot
The 'Embrace the Disruptor' Pattern
Best Buy's turnaround exemplifies a recurring pattern in strategic history: the companies that survive disruption are rarely the ones that resist it hardest. Instead, they find ways to absorb the disruptive behavior into their own model. Just as judo uses an opponent's momentum against them, Best Buy used showrooming — the very behavior killing them — as the foundation of their comeback. The lesson is universal: when customers adopt a new behavior en masse, the strategic question isn't 'How do we stop them?' but 'How do we make money from this?'
“Our stores are not a liability. They are our greatest strategic asset. We have something Amazon can never replicate: 1,400 locations where customers can touch, feel, and experience products — and walk out with them the same day.”
— Hubert Joly
The Decisive Moment
By the summer of 2012, Best Buy looked like a company on borrowed time. CEO Brian Dunn had resigned amid a personal scandal. Founder Richard Schulze was attempting a leveraged buyout. The stock had cratered to $11.32 — down more than 60% from its peak. And the word on every analyst's lips was 'showrooming': the devastating practice of customers browsing Best Buy's aisles, testing products with the help of knowledgeable blue-shirted employees, then pulling out their smartphones to buy the same item from Amazon at a lower price. Best Buy was paying the rent so Amazon could make the sale.
Into this crisis stepped Hubert Joly, a French-American executive with no retail experience — a fact that drew immediate skepticism from Wall Street and the board alike. But Joly brought something more valuable than industry knowledge: fresh eyes. In his first month as CEO, he visited more than 30 stores, worked the floor alongside employees, and listened. What he heard changed everything. Employees told him they loved the company but felt powerless. Customers told him they valued the ability to see, touch, and test products before buying. The stores weren't the problem — they were the answer.
Joly's 'Renew Blue' strategy was built on a counterintuitive premise: stop fighting showrooming and start leveraging it. Best Buy launched aggressive price matching against Amazon and other online retailers, eliminating the price gap that drove customers away. But that was just the beginning. Joly invested in employee training, turning the Geek Squad and in-store advisors into genuine experts who could add value no algorithm could match. He restructured vendor relationships, creating store-within-a-store experiences for Samsung, Apple, Microsoft, and Sony. He transformed 1,400 stores from pure retail outlets into fulfillment centers for online orders, slashing shipping times and costs.
The results were staggering. Within 36 months, Best Buy's stock had more than tripled. Online sales grew at a 25% compound annual growth rate between 2012 and 2017. Same-store sales turned positive. The company that analysts had written off as the next Circuit City or RadioShack was suddenly being studied as a model of retail reinvention. By December 2017, Best Buy stock had climbed past $60 — a more than fivefold increase from Joly's first day.
The Best Buy turnaround stands as one of the clearest examples of a strategic fork in modern business. The company faced a binary choice: fight the tide of digital disruption or find a way to swim with it. By choosing to embrace the very behavior that was destroying them, Joly and his team turned Best Buy's greatest vulnerability — its massive physical footprint — into its most powerful competitive advantage.
Apply the Lessons
A framework for turning existential threats into competitive advantages.
Identify your 'showrooming'
What customer behavior threatens your current business model? List the specific ways customers are bypassing you.
Separate signal from noise
Create two columns: What is permanently changing customer behavior (signal) vs. what are temporary distractions or defensive reactions (noise)?
Inventory your hidden assets
Like Best Buy's 1,400 stores, what do you have that your digital competitors don't? Physical locations, expertise, relationships, trust?
Design a counterintuitive move
What would it look like to embrace the threat? If customers are doing X, how can you make X easier/better for them — on your terms?
Frequently Asked Questions
Sources & Further Reading
- Hubert Joly (2021). The Heart of Business: Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism. Harvard Business Review Press.
- Harvard Business Review (2017). Best Buy's Turnaround: How Hubert Joly Led the Retailer's Comeback. Harvard Business Review.
- Brad Stone (2013). The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. Little, Brown and Company.
Cite This Analysis
Stratrix. (2026). The Day Best Buy Stopped Fighting Amazon. Strategic Forks. Retrieved from https://www.stratrix.com/strategic-forks/best-buy-showrooming
From Analysis to Action
Study the strategic fork, understand the decision, then build your own strategy — powered by AI.