Last year, in a bold and risky move, Circuit City fired it's highest-paid most-knowledgeable employees and replaced them with lower-wage help. To recap read HERE. Now it appears Circuit City's strategy has backfired! Best Buy is kickin' some serious booty on Circuit City, Wal-Mart, and others as it has realized that service is key to sales. Check out THIS story. I love it!

Its a good read Dave.........being a worker at Best Buy for a service dept I can tell you that customer services is just DRILLED into our heads; We have store-wide meetings often and this is always the subject of discussion -- that is "treating the customers as individuals" instead of just pushing product out the door....

I can't speak for other stores or retailers but I can tell you that we are very worried about our customer's experience in service dept.

As far as knowledgable goes that is a topic for debate....it all depends on store's mgmt and how they wish to hire. Our specific store has a pretty smart group of kids in the geek squad as our mgmt and geek squad leadership tends to want more tech-saavy with a little customer skills than the other way around -- granted none of us are Guru's when it comes to everything but each has his/her own area of pride I guess you could say

Awesome find Dave. Great to see things like this happen in an era where the skilled worker is expendable for the almighty dollar.