Best Buy Tries On Apple's Sleek Look
RICHFIELD, Minn.—Best Buy Co. is testing a new turnaround strategy: making its cavernous electronics emporiums look more like Apple Inc.'s sleek retail outlets. — The heart of a test store near Best Buy's headquarters here is a Solution Central help desk …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Richfield test store is the latest step in a decade-long courtship between the two retailers: Best Buy pushed to carry Macs in more of its stores back in 2008 and landed an Apple TV exclusive in 2007, and by March 2012 it was selling nearly as many iPhones as Apple itself through its retail channels. The difference now is that Best Buy is copying the format, not just the inventory — a move that follows Apple's own major store space reorganization in 2009 and its years of proving that a help desk and open tables can sell hardware at premium margins.
The redesign lands amid a brutal stretch for the chain: fiscal fourth-quarter sales missed expectations in March 2012, Best Buy announced it would close 50 big-box stores, it shut down its Best Buy Connect mobile service by June 1st, and it shifted employee pay toward customer-service performance — the same lever this test store's Solution Central desk is built around. A rumored $1,499 42-inch Apple HDTV floated in a Best Buy customer survey earlier in 2012 hints at how much of the relationship's upside management sees on Apple's side of the aisle.
First-order effects
- Best Buy's sales staff, already moved onto service-based compensation in March 2012, now work a floor designed around assisted selling — making the pay change and the layout change two halves of one bet that advice, not shelf space, drives electronics purchases.
- Apple gains a larger de facto retail footprint without spending on real estate: a partner whose stores mimic its own format extends Apple's brand presence into markets where its own outlets are thin.
Second-order effects
- Rival big-box chains face pressure to match the service-desk format or concede the high-touch shopper, while vendors whose products lack Apple's pull must fight for attention on floors increasingly organized around a single brand's aesthetic.
- If the test spreads across the surviving fleet after the 50-store closure round, Best Buy's economics tilt further toward services, attachments like AppleCare, and activation-driven phone sales rather than box-moving volume.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward consumer-electronics retail consolidating around two models — brand-owned flagship stores and licensed imitations of them — squeezing out the generalist showroom that defined the category for decades.
- For manufacturers, the test strengthens the argument that retail design is a competitive weapon worth dictating contractually, accelerating the shift of merchandising power from retailers to the brands whose look the floor adopts.
The trend: Big-box electronics retail is converging on Apple's store playbook — service desks, open tables, and advice-led selling — as the answer to showrooming and shrinking hardware margins.