Finance History | 11 Wall Street — Sound of Music Took the Big Board Tape in 1987

People treat Best Buy as a Richfield, Minnesota box that never needed a junior market.

The listed company began as Sound of Music, Inc., incorporated in 1966, and spent two years off the Big Board after its first public sale.

Reference for Business records that Best Buy went public in 1985 and gained a New York Stock Exchange listing in 1987, the year revenues reached 239 million dollars from 24 stores in 1987 currency.

The name change from Sound of Music to Best Buy Co., Inc. had already happened in 1983. The superstore format arrived in 1984.

Later market-data files treat 20 July 1987 as the first New York print under BBY. That date is the Exchange listing, not the 1985 float.

The mechanism is a regional electronics chain that sold stock first and only later graduated to the auction market once the warehouse format had a price history.

Headquarters later settled at 7601 Penn Avenue South in Richfield. That campus opened in the early 2000s and is not the 1987 pin.

The pin is the Broad Street facade of the Exchange, where BBY printed. Interior trading is not visitable from the sidewalk.

Photo: Arild Vagen, August 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. New York Stock Exchange from Broad Street.