Retail just lost one of its few female CEOs. She kept Best Buy afloat during the pandemic

Barry will be remembered for keeping Best Buy afloat during the difficult pandemic period and through the impact of tariffs last year. Still, the company’s sales performance has been stagnant over the past few years, with a slight increase from 2024 to 2025. The company reported net income of about $1.1 billion last year, up 15% from the year before, on $41.7 billion in revenue. In the fourth quarter of the past year, its last reported period, the company earned $541 million on $13.8 billion in revenue.

“She guided Best Buy with a confident and steady hand and an unrelenting commitment to drive value for our employees, customers, partners and shareholders through some of the most tumultuous and uncertain times we have ever seen,” David Kenny, chair of Best Buy’s board of directors, said in the news release.

‘Sensible moves and sensible strategies’

Best Buy stores were closed for several months during the pandemic and quickly transitioned into drive-up fulfillment centers for online orders.

Gildenberg said that, due to the pandemic, the company had to adapt as customers grew accustomed to shopping online more often in some categories or found new uses for the traditional big box.

“They were one of the first to pivot to curbside collection; they had appointments in-store; they pivoted teams to providing service remotely; they really went as far as they could, because it was an extremely disruptive period,” said Neil Saunders, managing director and retail analyst at GlobalData Retail. “They provided a textbook response, and I think a lot of that was Corey and her management team’s doing.”

The company brought more services into stores, created specialized areas to highlight specific brands and leaned into omnichannel capabilities like pickup.

“With Covid, I think they became a much stronger digital enterprise,” Gildenberg said. “Post-Covid, the impressive thing was the ability to sit down and think about, ‘OK, our stores are going to be forever different as a result of Covid. What does that mean for us in terms of our selling model and our economic model?’”

The company also built up its retail media business and membership programs under Barry, and just launched a new third-party marketplace. It struck a notable partnership with Ikea just last year for furniture-buying areas within Best Buy stores. “She was alert to those opportunities,” Saunders. “Those things will pay dividends longer term. They were sensible moves and sensible strategies.“

Barry will also be remembered as a very good people leader, Saunders said.

“There is an enormous respect for Corie among the teams at Best Buy. She’s the type of leader that goes out into stores,” Saunders said. “She is hands-on, she listens to people on the ground, and she takes that feedback upwards. I think the executives and the corporate teams that work with her also feel that level of respect.”

An unexpected yet unsurprising exit

It’s so far unclear why exactly Barry is stepping down, and a Best Buy spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

However, this marks a recent trend of prominent retail leaders departing from their roles. In 2024, Modern Retail spoke with half a dozen women retail executives about why women leave their positions and found that the double standards facing women executives contributed to shorter tenures and unplanned exits.

Barry has been at the helm of Best Buy for seven years, which Bryan Gildenberg, founder and CEO of Confluencer Commerce and a longtime retail consultant, calls a pretty long tenure for retail CEOs. He said that if she were to go on longer, she would be signing up for a multi-year transformation for the AI era.

“I would certainly understand why somebody would not sign up for that,” Gildenberg said.

Doug McMillon and James Quincey, who recently left Walmart and Coca-Cola, respectively, cited a need for new energy and understanding of AI to withstand the technological transition of their companies, CNBC reported. It’s unclear whether AI played a role in Barry’s departure.

“I wasn’t necessarily expecting a change at the top so soon, but I think it’s something that was always potentially on the cards,” Saunders said. “There is a view among investors that Best Buy has been pretty well-managed but just hasn’t been producing the levels of growth that the market wants to see. It has been that way for some time, and I think there’s a sense that a little bit of change is perhaps needed in the organization.”