Petition to Best Buy Officers and Directors from the Customers and Friends of Middle C Music in Washington, DC

We, the undersigned, urge you to re-think Best Buy’s plans to open a guitar store-within-a-store at your Tenleytown location in Washington, DC. We feel strongly that this business decision jeopardizes the continued existence of a cherished locally-owned business and poses a threat to the vitality of our neighborhood’s commercial strip.

Our community was delighted when Best Buy decided to set up shop in our neighborhood, and since you’ve been here, we’ve greatly appreciated your donations to local schools and non-profits. We take you at your word when you claim that “Giving back to our communities is central to the way we do business at Best Buy” -- which is why we assume that Best Buy’s senior management is unaware of the implications of choosing Tenleytown as the site of your first foray into guitar sales on the East Coast.

The Tenleytown Best Buy is located a block south of Washington, DC’s only full-service music store – Middle C Music. This flourishing locally-owned independent retailer has been a neighborhood resource for the past six years and both the store and its owner have received national recognition for their success. Middle C provides a wide variety of services -- music lessons for all ages and levels, performance space, part-time professional employment for local musicians, sheet music for bands, piano instruction, choral groups, instrument rentals, master classes by visiting artists, summer music camps, publicity for local concert series -- but guitar sales are crucial to its bottom line. Remove that profit center, and the whole enterprise is likely to go under. Best Buy cannot and will not replace what it is likely to destroy in our neighborhood if you go forward with this plan.

We’re not anti-competition. We can certainly see potential benefits from competition between Best Buy and Guitar Center. When two national chains go head-to-head vying for dominance in the same niche, consumers benefit. But that’s not the case in the David vs. Goliath scenario you’re setting up in Tenleytown.

We appreciate that the Tenleytown store itself represents a pioneering effort for your corporation – an attempt to move beyond the big box format in order to better serve city-dwellers. What we are asking is that, as you enter such markets, you make an effort to understand and respect the fragile ecology of neighborhood-serving retail in urban environments.

As many of us can attest, Middle C’s presence on this block of Wisconsin Avenue directly benefits other neighborhood retailers, including Best Buy itself. Middle C contributes to and extends the retail presence on its side of the street (which would otherwise be dominated by office uses) and it brings affluent consumers to this commercial strip virtually every day of the year. We shop, often at Best Buy, while we wait for 30 minutes or an hour each week while our kids take music lessons. And in many cases, the synergy is even more direct – for example, Middle C’s upcoming Guitar Hero tournament will both capitalize on and fuel demand for a product that Best Buy sells locally.

We’re not asking you to forego entering the musical instrument business in the metro DC market – in fact, we think that adding a guitar shop at your Rockville Pike location (a mile from Guitar Center and less than 10 miles up the road from our neighborhood) would be a great idea. But don’t destroy one of our local treasures as you experiment with this new niche. You stand to lose more than you’ll gain by such an approach.

To sign, either stop by Middle C (4530 Wisconsin Avenue) or email your name and address to Myrna Sislen (info@middlecmusic.com) with a request that they be added to the petition.