Big Apple test bed for Best Buy’s wireless expansion

Big-box retailer Best Buy has branched out with a greater emphasis on wireless, opening new stores in the New York metro area that focus exclusively on offering a wide selection of handsets from various carriers.
Five of the new stores are stand-alone, and the others are located within existing Best Buy stores; the stores are a result of a deal with United Kingdom cell-phone retail giant Carphone Warehouse Group. The trial of the concept stores is set to run into next year, but Best Buy declined to speculate about whether it might expand them into markets other than New York.
The Bet Buy/Carphone Warehouse partnership also will result in a U.K. computer repair service under Best Buy’s Geek Squad brand.
The stores opened up within the past two weeks, just in time for the holiday shopping season, and are located in particularly high-traffic areas of Manhattan such as Times Square and Grand Central Station.
John Zittrauer, sales lead at the new stand-alone store in Union Square, said that while a normal Best Buy store might offer around 30 handset models, the new store is “closing in on 100” different models and colors of devices.
“The interest from the customers is really huge,” said Zittrauer. “They’re used to having to go to one store for each carrier, or maybe a store that has one or two different carriers. . it’s a night and day difference” in terms of the number of handsets that customers have available to choose from, he said.
Best Buy also is making an effort to provide better customer service than carrier stores by having employees free to circulate on the store floor to reach out to customers. Zittrauer said that customers at the Union Square store regularly share stories of having to take numbers at crowded carrier stores before even being approached by a store employee.
He added that since the Best Buy employees are not compensated based on commissions, they are free to recommend the plan and phone most suitable for the customer, instead of what earns them the most money.
Zittrauer said that the Motorola Inc. Razr handset continues to be immensely popular with customers, and that the new Krzr follow-up is selling briskly as well. The Sony Ericsson W810, which resembles a camera and features an FM radio capability, also has drawn customers’ attention.
Zittrauer added that while customers used to make wireless choices based on picking the carrier that they thought offered the best coverage, the trend has shifted. Customers now commonly make their choices based on which handset they like the most, and then the carrier and plan follows. Customers also are willing to pay slightly more each month for a plan if they can get the phone they fancy.
Store traffic at the Union Square location on the day after Thanksgiving was consistent all day, he said, despite the fact that “basically, our advertising was the signage in front of our stores,” Zittrauer said.
However, those signs feature photos of neighborhood residents, some of them shot while the people use their cell phones. Zittrauer said one young man featured in the posters regularly visits the store and brings his friends in to shop.