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Best Buy closes all Future Shop stores across Canada, cutting 1,500 jobs

Xinhua, March 29, 2015 Adjust font size:

Best Buy Canada Ltd. on Saturday announced that it decided to close 66 of the 131 Future Shop electronics chain stores and consolidated the rest in the country.

The company said the decision of shutting down the 66 Future Shop locations became effective immediately in the day. The remaining 65 Future Shop stores will be closed for consolidation and transition into the Best Buy brand and reopen for business one week later.

The reshuffle will lead to a loss of 1,500 jobs, including 500 full-time positions, said Best Buy Canada in a press release.

The company explained it has reviewed all locations for Future Shop and Best Buy stores and found some were adjacent to each other, often in the same parking lot. After the consolidation, Best Buy will now have a total of 192 locations across Canada, including 136 large-format stores and 56 Best Buy Mobile stores.

"Currently, 80 percent of our customers are within a 15 minute drive to a store and this won't change," Ron Wilson, president and COO of Best Buy Canada, said in the press release. "We will continue to have a strong store presence in all major markets in Canada."

The sudden store closings took many employees and customers by surprise across Canada on Saturday morning. Outside a Future Shop store in Toronto's North York Centre, an employee, who asked not to be identified, said they were called into a meeting early morning, but they had no other choices but to accept the lay-off severance package deal. A woman passer-by said she barely noticed the sign showing the store that was closed, because she seldom visited the brick-and-mortar shop since doing shopping online.

The electronics market used to have good performance but it went on decline in recent years due to digital market change and online shopping trend, retail analysts say.

The first Future Shop store opened in Vancouver in 1982. By 1993, the chain stores had become the country's largest retailer of computer and consumer electronics and operated 139 locations across Canada as of January 2013. There followed by some downsizing and closure in the coming years.

In November 2001, the U.S. consumer electronics giant Best Buy purchased the Future Shop chain stores for 580 million U.S. dollars. Endite