Best Buy to cut 650 Geek Squad employees
The company says that the employees' last day will be August 1, if they can't find another position by then.
Best Buy has decided to cut down the number of employees working in its Geek Squad division.
The company confirmed to Minneapolis-St. Paul news station KARE 11 last night that it will lay off 650 Geek Squad workers nationwide. The company told the news outlet that it will offer the affected employees severance, and will aid them in finding new jobs.
Some of those jobs might be within Best Buy itself. KARE 11 says that the last day for Geek Squad employees will be August 1, assuming they don't find another job outside or even inside the company before then.
Best Buy's announcement is just the latest in a string of issues the company has suffered from in the last several months. Aside from suffering through an ailing business, Best Buy has watched its former CEO Brian Dunn resign and its founder Richard Schulze leave the board. The retailer has also been forced to shutter 50 stores.
As Best Buy apparently tries to become more agile in its market, the company is working on a new store design its interim CEO Mike Mikan calls "Best Buy 2.0." The stores are 20 percent smaller than the company's traditional locations and mimic in some ways the design of Apple's own brick-and-mortar stores.
According to the Wall Street Journal, which took a walk through one of the prototype stores, the Geek Squad's help desk standards at the "heart" of the new design.