Almost one year to the day, Best Buy Canada has announced another round of job cuts. Eight hundred jobs were slashed last year and at the time Best Buy execs stated they would embark on “Renew Blue” initiative and focus on a “long-term transformational strategy to optimize the company’s retail footprint.”
Today, the Vancouver-based retailer has decided to shed another 950 full-time employees from both the Best Buy and Future Shop brands, specifically noting they’ll be “consolidating sales departments and reducing management layers.”
Ron Wilson, President of Best Buy Canada, said, “We have been focusing on simplifying our store structure and increasing efficiencies to better align with the changing needs of our customers.”
Certainly unfortunate news for Canada. Wilson also stated that one of the reasons for the reduction is due to the fact that people are now buying electronics in a different manner. “We have seen our online sales grow by more than 50 per cent in the past year and new services such as in-store reserve and pick up more than doubling. These changes in the way our customers are interacting with us have led us to look at how to best deploy our staff to meet those evolving needs.”
Both Best Buy and Future Shop were quick to embraced the e-commerce and mobile shopping play by launching mobile apps on several platforms. In addition, apart from the major credit cards, the company recently started to accept PayPal payments for online orders. There are a total of 79 Best Buy stores and 149 Future Shop stores spread across Canada.
Source: Best Buy
