2 Responses to “best buy is not to buy from best buy”

1. blackmail.is.my.life Says:
   January 26th, 2006 at 9:58 pm

   I’m not entirely sure that I get the cause for alarm. Loss leaders are loss leaders. Unlike your mom and pop brick and mortar retail outlet, chains like Best Buy, Circuit City, Target and Wal-Mart have been beating their suppliers to a pulp in ways that haven’t been seen probably since Rockefeller blackmailed the railroads to carry his oil. The difference between the two is that those chains not only have clout to engage those practices, but they also have the differentiated product to entice people to come into the stores to buy other goods, which ideally is where they recoup those losses.

   This is a corollary of the notion that Mac, Gerard and others put out; they’re labels trying to get art/product into the public sphere, which means doing business with these folks. Once the business gets done, it’s more or less out of their hands when it comes to price setting and so forth. So while Best Buy are beating up on small retailers by carrying hot titles so cheaply, they in turn get hurt badly by every customer who comes in specifically to buy those titles, or worse, brings in a competitor’s ad that they have to match on titles they have marked up to ward off the affects of the loss leader phenomenon. Even though there’s no Circuit City here in Philly, I regularly walk down to BB to pick up hiphop titles, carrying the CC ad with me.

   I think that there’s been a conflation on the part of these angry labels of price and cost, and it’s no minor detail. What’s probably more at issue is that these few retail outlets can play ball with equally few major retailers, incl. internet. Of equal importance is how bad independent stores are at buying records too. I don’t have much sympathy for distributors since they are after all just middlemen who’ve never been more than legal racketeers with access to channels and transport.

   As someone who works for a company that competes with most of the retailers mentioned, it’s easy to see that there’s much more to this (that is, capitalist modes of production) than gets covered here to convince me that my consumption patterns are political or pathological because I’m looking for a low price. I don’t shop at Target, but that’s because they don’t offer women over the counter emergency contraceptive, and I don’t shop at WalMart because of their power and cruelty, not because I don’t want inexpensive goods.

   I can think of few things more cynical than treating consumption as politics, but I think the Urban Outfitter’s model has convinced a lot of people that they’re one and the same. The agglomeration of companies into oligopolistic competition is part of what’s driving everything to the bottom, but not buying art or groceries isn’t what’s going to stop it. This is in my view part of a much larger political project that needs to be organized to protect consumers and workers from bad business practices.

2. Blackmail Is My Life » Blog Archive » Sympathy for the Middle Man Says:
   February 26th, 2006 at 4:22 pm

   […] Is there no alternative? The parasite’s only fear is the death of its host. Mairead Case’s article at Pitchfork on Best Buy’s loss leader maneuvers illustrates how desperate the record industry has become in recent years. But as I mouthed off at Her Jazz, not only is there a bigger picture, there are many pictures. […]

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