It’s the weekend, you’re bored, and you’re tired of reading about the latest tech gadgets online. Where do you go? Best Buy. You know you’ll probably not be buying anything from there, but you want to kill an afternoon, either alone or with a friend.
Today Samsung is announcing that they’re going to stick their own stores inside Best Buy’s stores. By next month, 900 of these mini-shops will be up and running. And by the time summer rolls around, they should be in over 1,400 Best Buy locations.
What are these dedicated mini-stores going to sell?
According to the press release: “Samsung’s full range of mobile products including smartphones, tablets, laptops, connected cameras and accessories.”
Will they actually move any significant inventory? That’s hard to say.
Part of me wants to say yes, because I bought my Galaxy Note II from just such a mini-shop in Kuala Lumpur, but another part of me feels like Best Buy doesn’t get the kind of foot traffic it used to back in the “good old days” when online shopping was this weird thing that only early adopters experimented with.
There’s also the whole staffing issue. Can Samsung find enough people, enough motivated and dedicated individuals, to peddle their stuff? You and I both know what’s going to happen. The people you’re going to talk to at these so called Samsung mini-shops will probably be fresh out of High School and will only know how to answer the questions they spent 90 minutes learning how to answer before earning a coveted blue Samsung shirt.
All I know is that this will help increase Samsung’s brand awareness, and that’s always a plus.