Stephen Harper vs. Best Buy

I love how fast the comment section in this CBC story about Best Buy closing/converting the remaining Future Shop locations quickly turns into a left-right flame war about Prime Minister Harper's economic stewardship. (this isn't unique to CBC, the CTV comments section turned out about the same)

Blaming the government for Future Shop (or Target!) is of course insane. Also, of course, NDP supporters are all a little loopy to begin with, so this wasn't a long stretch for them.

The closure of Future Shop was coming, though the quickness of the news was pretty shocking: on Saturday when the news broke I drove down to my local Future Shop to discover it was already boarded up. Lots of people were trying to get in and check out some closing deals that we now know will never happen (though, if Target was any indication, we wouldn't have been impressed anyways). In fact, Target Canada's shutdown is being touted as one of the lessons that motivated Best Buy to drop the hammer: Target employees have had morale and theft problems now that they're being asked to work their business to death. Best Buy has the luxury of keeping the inventory and re-jigging the store, so why not just do that rather than the hit of disgruntled employees chasing away customers (or giving them handfulls of stuff to walk out on)?

I haven't been involved in a business during its failing stage, but I know people who have, and it isn't pretty. From CompuSmart to the Celanese plant, working at an organization during the "shutdown operations" phase is depressing and unproductive. Best Buy gets to avoid that fate, so we probably shouldn't begrudge them that.