Best Buy: Still the Best

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Go ahead, naysayers, ditch Best Buy (NYSE: BBY), but I suspect you may regret it over the long term. Despite what could easily be viewed as a lackluster second quarter, maybe investors should think twice before turning their backs on this innovative retailer.

Granted, Best Buy's second-quarter net income dropped 19.2% to $202 million, or $0.48 per share. That's despite its revenues jumping 12% to $9.8 billion, and same-store sales increasing by 4.2%. It kept its guidance for fiscal 2009 unchanged, expecting earnings of $3.25 to $3.40 per share.

Despite many investors' fretful reactions, today I've remembered why Best Buy strikes me as heads above rivals like Circuit City (NYSE: CC) and RadioShack (NYSE: RSH).

It's not the Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPhones in Best Buy's aisles, or its recent (and I thought fairly weird) announcement that it will snap up Napster (Nasdaq: NAPS). Rather, a Wall Street Journal article caught my eye, covering how Best Buy's been experimenting with a "prediction market" called TagTrade, which allows rank-and-file employees to try to help predict how successful they believe services and ideas will be. (It caught my Foolish colleague Rick Munarriz's eye too, and he covered this topic at length in his earlier Best Buy: Down With Executives? piece.)

Such attention to the power of community intelligence is certainly picking up steam these days -- gosh, our Motley Fool CAPS service also utilizes a similar theory, of course. The article also noted that several less surprising techie companies like Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) have dabbled in similar measures.

However, a retailer realizing that its front-line employees likely have great insight and information, and that management can find a way to tap, monitor, and probably use such feedback, is a pretty significant example of thinking outside the box. This wouldn't be the first time that Best Buy has impressed me with its tendency to try interesting, even radical, ideas -- last year I was highly impressed with its experiment in something called ROWE, or "results oriented working environment."

Of course, having snazzy ideas and not executing on them properly is always a risk. But Best Buy's willingness to at least try implies it isn't going to forget how to innovate and evolve, a huge risk for many large companies, including retailers.

Last but not least, given additional pressures coming from the macroeconomic situation, Best Buy looks like a reasonably priced stock, trading at just 13 times this year's expected earnings and sporting a PEG ratio of 0.89. These look like good times to snap up Best Buy.

Snap up some related Foolishness while you're at it:

• Rich Smith gave us the Foolish Forecast for Best Buy on Monday.
• Last quarter, I asked if it was the best time for Best Buy.
• Early this year, Fools disagreed on whether Best Buy would be the Best Stock for 2008 or the Worst Stock for 2008.