CravenMorehead: I'd be willing to bet that Best Buy will start closing stores in the US in the near future. They grew too fast and shoe-horned their way into too many small markets that can't support them when the economy is in the tank. Couldn't happen to a nicer company.

/haven't spent a penny at a Best Buy in over 3 years.

You'll see a lot of their stores closing, but I don't really think it's for this reason. Right now they've got a LOT of overhead tied up in real estate. More and more people are using their stores as showrooms for what they want to buy online. They'll check it out in best buy, play with it, and go order it off of newegg. Best Buy has since begun to compete, but at this point, they're pretty far behind in that arena and they've squandered whatever reputation they had.

Didn't help that most of the video games, movies, and CDs are moving to digital formats (itunes, netflix, steam, gamefly, etc.), so physically going to the store to purchase these things isn't necessary.

What they do have is that a lot of their sub-brands have been seeing pretty tremendous increases. Their mobile division seems to magically see around 40% increases in growth (employees/profits/locations) on a yearly basis. They tend to have some pretty good deals as well.

They're not out of the game yet, but I def think you'll see them moving away from the Big Box model. Don't know if they'll be able to get away from it before their real estate sinks 'em though.