In 48 hours in late march, Corie Barry, the new CEO of Best Buy, made a flurry of decisions that dramatically transformed the electronics retailer: On March 22, Best Buy stopped allowing shoppers inside all 1,000 of its U.S. stores. Instead, employees would run orders out to customers waiting curbside.

Barry landed the top job at the electronics chain last June by plotting a path forward for Best Buy that deftly navigated shifts in e-commerce. Now, as she approaches her first anniversary, she’s again reimagining the company’s future. After Best Buy switched to curbside pickup, sales dropped just 30% compared with the prior year’s. While this proved a much smaller hit than what other retailers suffered, Barry still had to furlough 51,000 of the company’s 125,000 employees—and take a 50% pay cut herself until at least September.

As consumers loaded up on groceries to prepare for the pandemic, they also stocked up on Best Buy fridges and freezers. Lines outside stores stretched around the block, forcing Barry to adjust the model on the fly. “At least one customer in that line tracked down my phone number to let me know people were not socially distanced in that line,” she says.

For years, Best Buy has operated on a thesis that homes will become more “connected” with technology; the coronavirus has sped up that trend. “Never has our purpose been more real,” she says. The Q&A below has been edited for length and clarity.

Fortune: You are now, in May, reopening some 600 of your stores by appointment only. How do you know it’s the right time to reopen?

Corie Barry: We were named very early on an essential retailer by almost every state and municipality. But we felt like, as the weeks went on, it was time to move from essential retailing into safe retailing. Clearly people need the things we sell, and in some cases they really need us in their homes. Like if they have a broken fridge. Where you open is going to be dictated by a combination of what is the path of the virus, what are local jurisdictional regulations, and what is our employee availability. I’ll be honest, there is no perfect knowledge of when the right time is or what demand is going to be. By three o’clock on day one of reopening, I already had in my inbox feedback from our stores on what was working, what wasn’t. And some of the tweaks we’re already making.

How does the appointment model work? You’ve likened it to dating.

You can call, go online, or just walk up to a store to set your appointment. The next step is a pre-call about what to expect. We will ask you to wear a mask. When you come to the store, we will have them available. And then you’ll be paired with an associate who will literally be your concierge throughout the store. Everyone walks in a certain direction and it is marked so it’s very easy to keep social distance. Depending on the size of the store—our footprints range from 20,000 to 60,000 square feet—you’re probably talking somewhere between 10 and 24 customers in there at a time.

Now that some of the stores are reopening, is this an opportunity to bring back some of the [51,000] furloughed employees? Or what needs to happen to do that?

At this point, we are not bringing any of them back. Right now. We believe we can run this model with the employees that we have. I don’t know when it will look more like the model of old.

Will we ever get back to just being able to walk in a store and shop around?

Here’s what I don’t think it looks like. It doesn’t look like you use yesterday’s retail playbook to solve today’s problems. Just hypothesizing, it may be you see a lot of demand on the weekend and people are willing to come back in and shop, and you can create enough distance so your employees feel safe. But on the weekdays, it’s appointment-only, and you keep it a much more kind of constrained experience. And you always have curbside. I don’t think the playbook is ever going to look the way it looked before.

It’s one thing to make customers and employees feel safe in the store. What about your corporate employees—will they be working in the office anytime soon?

Best Buy, in our hearts, we had that old-school retail feeling, like, “The stores are going to be open, and everyone’s going to be at work!” And we knew we needed to change but just hadn’t quite had the impetus to do it. And then, literally overnight, all of our people corporately, about 5,000 of them, are working from home. And yet productivity on the whole was incredible.

So it will be a very staged and careful return to work plan. And our team is covering everything from, Are you going to wear masks? Probably, if you’re in shared spaces. Will there be temperature checks when you walk in the building? Probably, if it’s proven to actually reduce the spread of the virus. More people will likely work from home. Flexible work arrangements will be much more regular.