Best Buy, the consumer electronics retailer, was mired in misery and poor performance when Hubert Joly took over in early 2012. Best Buy was struggling to compete with Amazon and Walmart with a future portended by the closings of traditional brick-and-mortar electronics retailers. Best Buy’s sales, profits and stock price were all in the toilet.

What could a guy who for the previous eight years worked in a privately held travel company — and for the five years prior to that worked in a French media company — do to change this failing business model? What did Joly know about selling consumer electronics, or big screen TVs, or washers and dryers for that matter? As it turns out, nothing. But in a few years Best Buy’s stock, sales and profits were setting records.

What did Joly do? Very simply he cast aside the conventional wisdom of cutting wages, staff and costs to jack up profits. Instead, he did the opposite, investing in the company giving workers better perks, reorganizing store floor plans and — heaven forbid — even teaming up with Amazon. And to his credit, he reemphasized Best Buy’s tech support “Geek Squad” service.

During Joly’s seven-year Best Buy tenure, the company achieved a 335% shareholder return, a 50% reduction in carbon emissions, a $15 per hour minimum wage and the annual recycling of 2 billion (that’s with a “b”) pounds of electronics. By comparison, JBS and Tyson Foods had a return on shareholder equity of 45.6% and 119.5% respectively during the same seven-year time frame (Source: Macrotrends, LLC).

Lest you say that a record shareholder return and the altruism of curbing carbon emissions along with raising worker low wages are incompatible, Mr. Joly and Best Buy’s shareholders would beg to differ.

Best Buy’s performance under Mr. Joly was reported in last Sunday’s New York Times as an example of a moribund company in a moribund industry making a dramatic reversal in its fortunes and in so doing, resurrecting its consumer image and concomitant profitability. Why couldn’t the same be done in the beef industry, I thought?

What if one of beef’s Big Four — or a couple of them, or all of them, or maybe even the smaller players for that matter — adopted Joly’s Best Buy business model? Could the same resurrection that Joly caused to happen in retail consumer electronics occur within the beef industry?

Could the big beef behemoths — those companies that, for years, drove worker wages down by abrogating union contracts and paying low-wage immigrants to work in their stinky, cold plants slaughtering, eviscerating and cutting animal flesh into mouthwatering bite-size morsels — reverse themselves with minimum wages of $15 and above? To their credit, the big beef industry players have addressed workers’ wages with improvement to an average of $14.70 per hour (Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics).

Consumers responded to Joly’s Best Buy changes and began to visit the stores to purchase their electronics needs either in-person or online. When coupled with the “Geek Squad” follow up expertise, sales marched upward.

For the beef industry to replicate Best Buy’s successes, they will have to convince consumers that they, too, are employee-concerned and friendly. That will be a monumental task what with the lackluster and ineffective initial beef company COVID response. Conventional media may have hyped it up, but there were too many examples of beef plant employees getting sick with COVID while the companies fumbled a timely and effective response to curb the transmission of the illness. Proactive vaccination campaigns and employee welfare actions are a start of recovering consumer confidence.

The current uptick in consumer beef purchases won’t last without beef companies responding to post-COVID necessities. Consumers will no longer stand for companies mistreating their essential workers, or if they look askance at climate changing actions like ignoring their carbon emissions. All these need to be addressed with actions and results communicated to consumers to represent an industry that cares and is doing something beyond its profit necessities.

My warning for the beef industry players continues to be, “If you always do what you always did, you always get what you got.”

Where is beef’s Joly when we need him most?

Making beef a 'best buy'

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