There’s a pretty big sale taking place at Best Buy through Saturday night, with large markdowns to celebrate Best Buy turning 50 years old. A golden anniversary is as good a reason as any to host a massive sale, and some will argue that it’s not the only thing that’s on sale. Pull up a Best Buy stock chart, and you’ll find a stock that’s trading slightly higher so far in 2016 but still trading 25 percent below its all-time peak set three years ago.Best Buy is holding up far better than the thinning ranks of publicly traded rivals, but it’s hard to get excited about the superstore concept’s future. Best Buy has made it through half a century, but it’s going to be a real challenge to make it through another decade.Once they got rid of all the knowledgeable staff and replaced them with teenagers there was no reason to go. circuit city made the same bone-headed move and look how that turned out. If you can’t compete with the internet on price – you’ve got to offer something else to bring people in.Just to give a sense of their business practices: Up here in Canada they bought out a competitor but left all their stores in place and even built new ones using their name…literally next door to a Best Buy franchise. I’m not kidding, there are many areas that for years had brand new Best Buy and Future Shop stores literally next door to one another.Surely the industry titans who decided that was worth while will have no trouble keeping Best Buy afloat, besides where else am I going to preview things I later buy on Amazon?There was actually a reason for that; Future Shop worked on Commission and Best Buy didn’t. However customers were split almost 50/50 over what they wanted – about half believing that commission got them the best service while half hated it. So they left the Future Shops open for those customers.It worked out pretty well for Best Buy until there was a general market downturn.