Best Buy will close 250 phone-focused stores in the US
All those standalone Best Buy mobile phone outlets you see in malls will be gone by the end of May. According to various sources , the big box retailer is shutting down all the 250 mobile-focused shops it built across the US over the years, even during times it had to shut down some of its big box locations. It put up its first stores back in 2006 to capitalize on the growing mobile phone industry, but the phone biz is no longer as lucrative as it was back then. Walmart chief Hubert Joly apparently told employees in a letter that those small outlets are now more expensive to run than a big box store. He said in the letter: "We began to open them more than a decade ago, before the iPhone was even launched. Fast forward to 2018 and the mobile-phone business has matured, margins have compressed and the cost of operations in our Mobile stand-alone stores is higher than in our Big Box stores." It's not exactly surprising that Best Buy has decided to close all 250 sho...