Best Buy IdeaX

[#1]

This is primarily for the CEO or his staff..  I have read in various news releases, and there are many, that you are encouraged to implement operations that will emulate the new DIGITAL age.  What these news releases fail to remember is that any successful company has implemented first of all policies that address the basics of retail sales: customer service, product availability/knowledge, and price. People shop at AMAZON and others primarily because of product availability and.price.  They come to your stores because they can see the product they are interested in, ask questions and generally satisfy themselves regarding their intended purchase. Then it's off to the internet.  What to do?

1. Work towards having legislation implemented that would require any products purchased on-line to be taxed at the local rates. This will help reduce the price differences.

2. Reduce the inventory in your stores, but have immediate access to the various products to be able to offer quick shipping and delivery. Increase the range of products, but limit the number of each product in the store, this will help keep inventory costs at a minimum.

3. Offer the "lookers" a coupon or such that would honor a competative price for a limited period.

4. Have "teams" ready to help customers who receive the items, but are unsure or incapable of assembling and/or installing them. A strong selling point.

[#2]

I would also like to see legislation that requires online-only retailers to collect taxes upfront. I can say that we are currently going through a transformation to improve our business model. Any other thoughts on this idea?

[#3]

Last I knew, we have been pushing for tax legislation for the past couple years for online companies.  At least that's what the email I received a couple months back said.

[#4]

Reducing the inventory is a bad idea. Reducing and re-thinking the range of products they carry in stores is not. Best Buy stores have a lot of stuff that nobody and I mean nobody buys. I'm a former Best Buy employee and long-time shopper so I speak from personal experience when I say that there is far too much fluff on the shelves that simply doesn't sell to walk-in customers. In the PC peripherals section for example, there are many graphics cards that cannot be installed in any desktop sold at Best Buy, no real SSDs (HUGE ADD-ON FOR NOTEBOOK SALES!) to speak of, and the selection of low-capacity PC memory is of no use to customers since computers are already shipping with equivalent or greater amounts of memory. You have a huge emphasis on Best Buy For Business centers in local stores yet you carry almost nothing in your stores that are business-grade/business appropriate products (Laser printers for example) and Office Depot and Staples are sucking up your business customers. In the digital camera section there are several brands of flash memory with varying ranges of quality along with prices that are all over the place and Best Buy should only be selling two brands at the most. PNY flash memory is cheap and poorly made. You can break the PNY cards between your fingers if you try because they are held together by glue. Sandisk and Lexar cards are not and they are what camera companies use to test their products so that is what Best Buy should carry and price competitively against other retailers. You've also got tons of small digital cameras that are not different from one another as far as specs go and all over the place in quality and end-user satisfaction. Paring down the inventory with only quality products that have a good customer satisfaction rating would send a big message to your customers like me who shop frequently. HD camcorders? Get rid of them. I worked at Best Buy for years and we rarely ever sold one and people don't go through the hassles of dealing with video. In the MP3/Audio player section you have a variety of low-end headphones that I can buy down the street for 1/10th the price and a bunch of high-end models that nobody buys taking up space on the shelves that could be better used for other things. In the mobile phone section you have tons of duplicated cases and other products, mostly for the iPhone, from competing companies that don't sell well at all. If Best Buy were to actually use some common sense in picking the products they carry based on quality, how relative the products are to store profits, and actual customer interest instead of just putting whatever they can get their hands on in their stores, it would go a long way towards increasing both profits and customer satisfaction. If I buy an $800 laptop at Best Buy and I have to go across the area to Micro Center to get both memory and an appropriate SSD for it, what message does that send to me as a customer? It says you can't meet my needs and I should have just gone to Micro Center in the first place to get everything I need.

[#5]

Thanks for the input