All Best Buy Mobile Stores Are Closing Up Shop

Three years ago, Best Buy decided to shut down all the Future Shop locations across Canada. Several of these stores were kind of redundant; I remember at least a couple that were within a block of a Best Buy location. Now they’re taking the axe to all the Best Buy Mobile stores across the United States too.

As you might already know, Best Buy Mobile stores are the much smaller retail locations where they focus entirely on the mobile market. It’s where you go to buy a smartphone, sign up for a plan, or pick up any number of mobile accessories.

There are about 250 of these stores scattered in malls across the U.S. and Best Buy has decided to close them all. The goal, as you might imagine, is to cut costs and to figure out how to handle retail in a more profitable manner.

Whereas regular Best Buy locations are generally quite large (averaging about 40,000 square feet), Best Buy Mobile stores are much smaller at about 1,400 square feet. Contributing only 1 percent to the company’s total retail square footage, these stores also only accounted for just over 1 percent of company revenue. In short, they’re just not really worth the trouble.

So, Best Buy will continue to sell mobile devices and accessories through its big box stores and online, shuttering all 250 Best Buy Mobile locations in the U.S. by May 31. The 52 mobile stores in Canada are unaffected, at least for the time being.