12/1/2006 @ 11:12 am by Daniel Eisner
Best Buy opened up a “Best Buy Mobile” store in Manhattan recently. I was there a few days ago, and my first impressions were: “what are they thinking?”
First off, the mobile phone market is littered with big companies that tried to break into it (ESPN, anyone?). Not to mention, that NYC is crowded with mobile phone stores. You can’t go two blocks without passing a Cingular/Spring/TMobile all-in-one shop. But the big thing is that “Best Buy Mobile” is right across the street from “Verizon at Best Buy.” This is one of those moves that makes you wonder which marketing genius thought it up. Best Buy has decided to steal business from … Best Buy.
This deal is one half of a partnership with Carphone Warehouse, a UK-based phone retailer. Under the agreement, Best Buy will get to establish a “Geek Squad-like” service in the UK for IT consulting. So, upon further examination, it looks like Best Buy is humoring it’s UK partner in order to break into the European Market. Maybe it’s not such a bad move after all. Even if Best Buy Mobile fails to make any profit, IT consulting for consumers can be quite lucrative — possibly enough to compensate from a poorly thought-out US phone retail business.
March 10th, 2007 at 8:55 pm
Guys, the idea behind this partnership is that BB will be offering all networks under one roof, at the moment I cannot compare a Verizon deal against a Sprint or T-Mobile deal without travelling to three seperate stores and analysing seperatly 3 distinctly different deals.
This will allow all consumers access to all deals in the same place at the same time. This format has served to UK Public very well for years and I for one think its about time that more people joined the market to mix it up and create a space where consumers can have a fair and comparable understanding of which is the best deal for each individual.