What's different?
It's been a long time coming, but US electronics retail giant Best Buy is finally set to unveil its UK offering with the opening of its first superstore in Thurrock, Essex this weekend. Best Buy was offering the media an early look at the store this week and we had to satisfy our curiosity.
The Thurrock store is massive, but Best Buy has tried to lay it out in an intuitive way. There is a clear emphasis on connected devices, with the front half of the store mostly given over to mobile phones and notebooks, which we expected given this is a joint-venture with Carphone Warehouse. You can see our video tour of the store with Best Buy director of operations Matt Kelleher here.
On one level, the Thurrock Best Buy is a very large, new, well stocked consumer electronics superstore, but we've already got those - principally the DSG offerings: PC World and Currys. So the big question we wanted answered was what Best Buy thinks is so much better about its offering.
The answer lies in the in-store service above and beyond just the kit on the shelves. We spoke to Kam Prajapati, who is the general manager of the Thurrock store, and he emphasized that it's all about the ‘Blue Shirts' - i.e. the sales assistants.
You can see our TV interview with Prajapati below, and it's clear that he and his company think the help you get in store will be the differentiator. Thankfully this doesn't just seem to entail a wholesale importing of US style ‘have-a-nice-day' congeniality and, from talking to some of the Blue Shirts, Best Buy seems to have realized that us Brits not only find that kind of wide-eyed chirpiness hard to deliver, we're not very willing recipients of it either.