Best Buy CEO Says Employee Training Key to Reviving Stores

(From Bloomberg News) -- Best Buy’s new Chief Executive Officer Hubert Joly plans to focus more resources training employees at the world’s largest consumer-electronics retailer after an uneven performance among stores led to sales declines.

Training across various departments is aimed at making store employees “an undisputed point of reference” for customers, Joly said in an interview. He succeeded interim CEO Mike Mikan this month and spent his first three days on the job working in stores and made a house call with Geek Squad technicians to calibrate a television.

Joly, 53, is tasked with overseeing a turnaround at Best Buy as the retailer heads for its first annual revenue decline as rivals including Amazon.com Inc. grab customers. Best Buy’s same-store sales in the second quarter sank 3.2 percent after shoppers bought fewer televisions and notebook computers.

“We’ve got to stop the comparable-store sales decline,” Joly said by telephone from Minneapolis. “Across our stores, we have a wide range of performance. Leadership and quality of execution make a huge difference at the local store level. If we can improve our execution across the system, there is significant upside.”

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