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Retail

The Last Stand for Gap and Best Buy CEOs

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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The CEOs of Gap (NYSE: GPS) and Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) are at the ends of their respective ropes. If each company has poor holiday sales, as is expected, both chief executives likely will be out of jobs.

Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn has said more than once that the electronic retailer continues to lose ground to competition. When the company released its latest earnings, the numbers disappointed Wall. St. Best Buy also described the electronics market as challenging. Competitor Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) has not expressed similar pessimism. It is Best Buy’s failure to find a large online audience to compete with Amazon that will continue to be its most significant problem.

Gap also posted poor earnings for the most recent quarter. The clothing retailer said it would close 200 stores, or about 21% of its outlets. CEO Glenn Murphy cannot expect investors to be satisfied by decisions to shrink the firm. At some point soon, he will have to demonstrate that he can combine the right inventory with the right marketing to win back the market share that his firm has lost to retailers like Abercrombie & Fitch (NYSE: ANF).

Gap and Best Buy may post such poor numbers in the fourth quarter that each will decide to cut staff to improve margins for 2012. If that happens, the CEOs are likely to go as well.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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