Best Buy shut its stores to shoppers in March 2020 and kept 81% of sales

When US lockdowns began in March 2020, Best Buy faced the standard retail apocalypse script: electronics retailing was already considered a dying trade, and states were ordering non-essential stores to close. On March 22, 2020, the company proactively shifted its entire domestic chain to a contactless, curbside-only operating model — customers ordered online or through the app and picked up at the store door, while large appliances were delivered and all in-home installation and repair work was suspended. No customer set foot in a store.

The payoff came from infrastructure built before the crisis. In the six weeks after the switch, Best Buy retained roughly 81% of the prior year's sales — CEO Corie Barry credited the company's multi-channel capabilities and strategic investments of recent years. First-quarter domestic online revenue rose 155.4% on a comparable basis to $3.34 billion, reaching 42.2% of domestic revenue versus 15.4% a year earlier, while gross margin absorbed the extra supply-chain cost.

By the second quarter the model scaled: domestic comparable sales grew 5.0% despite the closures, and domestic comparable online sales grew 242.2% to $4.85 billion — about 53.1% of domestic revenue, versus 16.1% the year before — led by computing, appliances and tablets as households equipped for lockdown life. The retailer once written off as Amazon's showroom had its best growth in years with its stores closed to the public.

Best Buy kept ~81% of prior-year sales in Q1's last six weeks with no shoppers inside; by Q2 domestic comparable online sales rose 242.2% to 53.1% of revenue.

The move was decided and executed in days, before state orders forced a messier shutdown — converting a legal risk into a controlled operating model the company chose itself.

Curbside-only turned Best Buy's weakness, hundreds of big-box stores, into its strength: local inventory within driving distance of nearly every customer, staffed for pickup.

The app, website and store-level inventory systems were already in place from years of omnichannel spending, so the crisis required a policy change, not a technology build.

Accepting lower gross margin from supply-chain costs was the price of keeping revenue flowing — a trade the two quarterly reports show the company made consciously.

Unglamorous omnichannel spending becomes an emergency weapon: with app ordering and store inventory already built, every big box became a pickup node overnight — something pure e-commerce rivals lack.

By late August 2020 Best Buy's stores were fully reopened, and sales were still running about 20% above the prior year quarter-to-date — CFO Matt Bilunas told investors Q3 growth would continue, though no longer at that pace, and declined to give full-year guidance given the uncertainty. The episode proved the omnichannel investments of the previous decade could carry the entire business when stores closed, and recast electronics retailing — widely written off as dying before 2020 — as one of the pandemic's few growth industries.