Tech & Biz

Best Buy Lowers 2009 Earnings Forecast

by Jordan Yerman | November 12, 2008 at 08:13 am

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Electronics retail behemoth Best Buy is looking down the barrel of a dire holiday season, according to analysts both inside and outside the company. The ongoing economic slowdown is expected to curb the traditional North American holiday retail binge that normally bolsters a retail operation's fiscal year, and Best Buy has lowered its 2009 earnings forecast accordingly.

Best Buy, which saw its arch rival Circuit City file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Tuesday, said uncertainty surround the consumer spending climate has also made it difficult to project how its revenues will fare during the critical holiday shopping season.

Uncertainty usually scares investors, who pushed Best Buy's shares down a steep 10.85 percent to $21.29 a share in early morning trading.

And for the remaining four months left in the fiscal year, Best Buy is expecting comparable sales to drop anywhere from 5 percent to a whopping 15 percent

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dysamoria

at 09:45 on November 12th, 2008

This is an interesting news item, Jordan. It points to more than financial woes for a corporate beast:

As USA citizens have continually decreasing disposable income (lower value of the US dollar and lower income from employers, even for those employees with degrees and master's degrees directly relating to the employment field they find themselves in) and continually decreasing time to enjoy what that disposable income used to be for (time spent instead on longer work days/weeks and bringing work home, even if only via stress, means less time to enjoy hobbies, watch DVDs, enjoy family entertainment, etc.), companies like Best Buy will find themselves hard pressed to bring the dwindling middle class into their stores for anything other than look-n-lust.

-Intransitivus "one complex sentence per paragraph" of dysamoria