Corporate Responsibility Reports


2009 Report 2008 Report 2007 Report

Last year’s corporate responsibility report marked the first time we included several Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) metrics to demonstrate our non-financial performance. We are committed to maintaining this transparency and will continue to disclose our performance using some of the standardized metrics developed by the GRI. However, we expect our metrics to evolve over time and in some cases that will result in adding new metrics while removing others. Fiscal 2009 is no exception as this year’s report now includes the following performance indicators:

ENERGY 16: Total direct greenhouse gases emissions by weight (pounds per square-foot)

ENERGY 18: Initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and reduction achieved

Fiscal 2009 also marks the first year we will remove metrics that we no longer believe to be critical in the retail environment, including:

LABOR 7: Rates of injury according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration standard
* Despite our injury and illness rate improving for the second year in a row, we do not believe this to be a critical metric for retail.

LABOR 8: Education and training in place to assist workforce members
* While we will continue to provide information about our employee training program, this metric’s focus on serious diseases is not applicable for a retail corporation where employees are not at high risk.

In addition to adding and removing a few indicators, we are also making adjustments to some of the performance data that appeared in the fiscal 2008 corporate responsibility report. In particular, there were discrepancies with some of the factory audit and recycling data which has been corrected in this year’s report. We have learned to improve our measurement methodology by increasing metric definition clarity as well as setting clearer expectations for gathering data.

We have also learned the difficulties of measurement can be compounded when working across culture and language barriers. As with many aspects of our corporate responsibility program, we are striving for continuous improvement which, in fiscal 2010, will include our measurement process. Finally, this report includes, for the first time, performance data from Best Buy operations outside the U.S., including operations in Canada, China and Mexico as well as data from some of Best Buy’s U.S. based subsidiaries such as Pacific Sales, Speakeasy and Audiovisions.