Best Buy

eBay Now is a same-day delivery service, but not for items offered on eBay.com by its millions of sellers — at least not yet. Instead, the eBay Now service is exclusively for local brick-and-mortar retailers in certain cities: San Francisco and the Peninsula, San Jose, parts of New York City, Chicago, and Dallas. While Best Buy, AutoZone and Toys"R"Us were among the first retailers to participate in eBay Now, the list of retailers now participating include the following featured stores: Home Depot; Office Depot; Walgreens; GNC; Radio Shack; Macys; Microsoft; Guitar Center; Bloomingdale's; and Urban Outfitters.

As if the recent holiday season in the wake of the payroll tax increase and government shutdown hasn't already made 2014 a disappointment for retail, then the rest of the year may require a stiff upper lip in girding for the rest of the iceberg.

These are rough times for America's brick-and-mortar retailers. Last week, it was Radio Shack announcing plans to close 20 percent of its stores and Staples shuttering 12 percent in North America. Last week, it was Best Buy, announcing plans to cut 2,000 managers. Before that, Blockbuster going out of business, or J.C. Penney reporting another round of bad, bad news. Battered by the economy and the growth of e-commerce, the signs of decline of the American retailer have been many and hard to miss. 

Best Buy apparently told about 2,000 managers around the United States on Wednesday that they were being laid off, a move that would be the company's biggest job reduction since July 2012 as it continues to cut costs following a weaker-than-expected holiday season. The layoffs will affect about 1.4 percent of Best Buy's 145,000-person workforce, the Star Tribune learned. 

In 2014, retailers will finally have a "it's not who you are in the inside, it's what you do that counts" moment regarding buzzy phrases like "omnichannel," "showrooming" and "big data." That is, retailers will intensively focus on how consumers interact with their brand in every way possible. As such, customer experience management (CXM) will move front and center in 2014, replacing omnichannel as the main driver for retailers. Expect customer-rich experiences anchoring retail goals throughout 2014.

There is a crisis in retail. During the 2013 holiday shopping season, U.S. retailers received approximately half the holiday foot traffic they experienced just three years ago, according to ShopperTrak. With consumer confidence growing in leaps and bounds, the decline in foot traffic signifies a tectonic shift in the way consumers shop and buy. Today's consumers lead busy lives and

The first computer I ever bought was a Tandy TRS-80 I got at RadioShack in the mid-1980s. There was no floppy drive, no operating system, no internet connection and no hard drive. I used a tape recorder to save data, but I still felt pretty cutting edge, even if it was largely an expensive paperweight, since I had no programming skills and used it like a big calculator. While those were also the halcyon days of RadioShack, the electronics retailer would like 2014 to be the start of a new golden age.

Best Buy said Thursday that it's laying off 950 of its Canadian employees, the first major cutback since the electronics retailer reported disappointing holiday sales earlier this month. The company said the layoffs affected 6 percent of its workforce in Canada and will not result in any store closings. At the end of January a year ago, Best Buy closed 15 stores in Canada. It currently has 265 stores in Canada and had 16,000 Canadian employees before the layoffs. The move is another sign of retrenchment from the upward trajectory the consumer electronics giant experienced for much of last year.

Best Buy's stock has plunged 43 percent since October. It's not exactly the turnaround shareholders hoped for. But StellaService data shows the retailer has made significant improvements in at least one very important business performance metric — speed of delivery. Many industry watchers are asking, "How is Best Buy going to compete with Amazon.com?" Obviously, speed of delivery is an area retailers are battling to best each other. It seems Best Buy has found an advantage. As Amazon continues to build warehouses nationwide with the goal of delivering packages faster, Best Buy has been leveraging infrastructure that's already in place.

"We were surprised by the market decline," said Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly, during a teleconference with analysts. "Everybody expected it to increase by 2 percent or 3 percent, but it declined by 2 percent." The electronics retailer also blamed aggressive sales from competitors, "supply constraints for key products" and fewer customers during the key week leading up to Christmas. Joly identified those key products as tablets and iPhones. Disappointing cell phone sales contributed to the 0.8 percent decline in same-store sales during the 2013 holiday season.