Best Buy To Carve Out Space For Microsoft Stores 214
UnknowingFool writes "Best Buy and Microsoft will launch 600 Microsoft stores within Best Buy retail locations in a store-within-a-store concept. The Microsoft stores will occupy 1500-2000 sq ft within each location. The terms of the deal are not announced, but I assume it benefits both as Best Buy would likely charge rent to help with declining revenue. For Microsoft, they may get cheaper facilities than building their own stores. The last I heard, MS had a very ambitious plan to launch hundreds of stores a year. I have doubts about the success of this venture, considering anecdotally almost every MS store I've seen in my travels was nearly empty. Since they all were located near Apple stores, the stark difference in foot traffic was apparent. The only exception was the MS store near Redmond, which had a decent crowd."
Re:Amen to that. Sweat the small stuff. (Score:4, Informative)
I once paid nearly twenty dollars for a Sansa data cable (Don't ask. My wife was involved.)
I think wives are a big reason Best Buy is still around.
My wife wanted a laptop several years ago; I wanted to get one off the internet, but she didn't want to wait for shipping. So off to Best Buy we went, even though I hated that store. We got a demo unit that worked fine in the store, but a day or two after we got it home, the monitor started acting flaky. So we brought it back, and they refused to take it as a defective return (because when they looked at it, it was working fine), but only as a return/refund. But because it had some software I had installed on it, they wanted to charge some ridiculous fee for Geek Squad to uninstall the software so they could resell it (seriously: instead of wiping and reinstalling, they were going to just resell the machine as-is. I could have installed keyloggers or other malware for the next customer to be victimized by). So I had to stand there and uninstall it myself to avoid this fee. Then, while I was in the middle of this process, the monitor finally gave out completely; when they saw that, they went ahead and refunded our money on the spot, but the experience was an ordeal.
After that, my wife swore off ever buying from Best Buy again, and let me buy a laptop from Newegg.