Mobile Phones & Broadband

[Jacob-BBY Community Connector]

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Nexus1 wrote:

Any information about you guys opening early on 24th? 

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We have not instructed stores to open early on launch day.  Some stores may choose to but that will be their call.  I suggest asking your store on the 23rd what their plans are.

Since all of the inventory may be used to fulfill pre-orders, it may not be very necessary to open early.

[asenesac]

Jacob, I know you can't give numbers per store, but I have seen you mention that you stopped taking pre-orders in order to try not to go over the allotment you were expecting from Apple.  Can you give us an idea what that number is?

[gambithardy679]

OK, we all agree that Apple dropped the ball in issuing a release date that they could not possibly support the demand on.  They have done this before and they will do this again, but is it not Best Buys responsibility to say, well we received 50 iPhone 3G units two years ago and 75 iPhone iPhone 3GS units last year, so maybe we should put up a red flag on either a Corporation or local store level when they reach the 200th iPhone 4 "preorder".   To me a pre order denotes the fact that you are ordering before or "pre" sale and you will receive it when it actually officially launches.  How many people would be happy to buy a ticket to a huge blockbuster movie a week before it releases and be told that you might be able to see it the following Tuesday because they had no clue so many people would want to see it.  I also understand that Apple, AT&T and Radioshack also fell into this pit but if you are trying to become the industry leader in consumer electronics shouldn't you have better business intelligence in place to handle such a problem?  Thank you for your time, and have a great day.

[snum1fan]

The whole deal with this is that BB orders so many Iphones but what they order and what they recieve is two different things.

[jstiehler]

Best buy is like any business. They put in a purchase order to apple for xx amount of each model, apple then confirms with them xxx amount of each model, however when they ship them to the warehouse, apple realizes oh, I only have x amount of this model, so that's all i can ship.  just because a store orders a certain amount of an item from the supplier, and gets confirmation from the supplier, it doesn't mean that they will get that amount.  They will not know until they actually Open the Box at the store to see what arrived. 

In your analogy about preordering movie tickets....a movie theatre has a specific number of seats that does not change, no matter what. So they know beforehand that they can only sell 150 tickets for this theatre screen for this time.  If they oversell, it's the theatres fault. 

A store with inventory does not know what they are going to get until they actually unpack the box that they receive.  I know this from personal experience from working in a warehouse for another company for the last 5 years. 

[dullo]

About how many phones will Best Buy receive from Apple? I'm sure an exact number isn't really possible but I'm looking for an estimate.

[Nokia]

BB has ordered enough phones to fulfill all preorders.

[Aphex]

All preorders unless white?

[Nokia]

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Nokia wrote:

BB has ordered enough phones to fulfill all preorders.

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[Nokia]

Uh, the "all" should've been bolded there.