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Best Buy should be dead, but it’s thriving in the Age of Amazon:

There is, of course, one thing Best Buy has that Amazon doesn’t: more than 1,000 big-box stores. Joly saw the benefit of using them as showrooms — a word so fraught in retail that the company calls them showcases — for the big tech brands, Amazon included. Best Buy was among the first chains to feature Apple boutiques. In April 2013, Joly said there would be Samsung mini-shops in its 1,400 U.S. locations by June. That same month, Best Buy began adding 600 Microsoft stores-within-stores. Sony arrived in 2014. Last year, Best Buy turned over more space to Amazon and Google to better display their smart home technologies. The two are bitter rivals: Amazon doesn’t sell Google Home and offers a limited selection of Google’s Nest products. Best Buy is neutral ground.

The brands essentially pay rent to Best Buy (it’s cheaper than building stores) and either send in their own salespeople or train the blue shirts. No one at Best Buy would offer details about these partnerships. But even analyst Michael Pachter of Wedbush Securities Inc., who in almost 10 years has never recommended buying Best Buy’s stock, describes the partnerships as a phenomenal success because they ease the financial burden of operating stores while enhancing profit margins. “Best Buy is like an arms dealer,” he says. “They’re indifferent to what brand you buy as long as you buy it from them.”

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In August 2013, the company recruited Rob Bass from Target Corp. to make it more efficient and to save a couple hundred million dollars to help cover the costs of Joly’s price-matching strategy. Bass discovered quickly why customers were frustrated: Best Buy’s distribution centers typically weren’t open on weekends or holidays, and its warehouse management software was at least two decades old. The software has been updated, the supply operations extended, and two-day free delivery is standard on orders of $35 or more. In April 2016, Best Buy announced it would offer same-day delivery in a few cities for a fee. Right after that, Amazon expanded same-day delivery to some Prime customers for free. Best Buy then lowered its price, which had been as high as $20, to $5.99. This past holiday season, Best Buy expanded its same-day service to 40 cities.

Bass also turned back to the stores. He started a system that allowed them to fulfill orders via delivery and pickup. Best Buy says 70 percent of Americans live within 15 miles of one of its locations, so it’s been encouraging customers to come collect their orders. Forty percent of the time they do, which “helps my budget a lot,” Bass says. To make those pickups faster, the company is testing an “On My Way” function on its app to ensure customers don’t arrive before their TVs are retrieved from the back of the store. Since 2012 the proportion of its online revenue has more than doubled, from 7 percent of all U.S. sales to 16 percent, well above those at other big-box retailers.

As individual pieces of technology become simpler to use, connecting them gets more complicated and important for their utility. To Joly, this was a missed opportunity. “The vision I had from the beginning is for us to be to the consumer what a company like Accenture is for a business,” he says.

To one longtime employee, this was an enticing idea: an elite group of salespeople who could offer more than the Geek Squad did. Corie Barry had tried to start an advisory program in 2010 when she was a senior director without a budget. Now she’s chief financial officer.

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