Best Buy Expands Apple Support

At MacWorld Expo, I spoke with the good folks at Best Buy’s booth and held a lengthy conversation on how BB is planning to fill the void left by the closing of CompUSA. For those who don’t know, CompUSA has been the “Go-To” Store for computer peripherals and apparatuses for over a decade. Sadly, they couldn’t decide which role they wanted to play (A business store? A retail store? TVs? Computers?), so they never seemed retain their initial success.

Best Buy, on the other hand, seems to have its act together, and recently initiated Apple’s “Store With a Store” in about 50 stores on a trial basis. Well, it must have been a successful trial, since they increased that number to 600 stores and according to Best Buy spokesperson, Jeff Dudash, plans are that fully two thirds of the Best Buy chain will feature Apple.

“Support” is a loaded word. And at Best Buy it certainly involves the Geek Squad. It has been reported that the Geek Squad would “Rather make a salesman into a tech” than the other way around. But in my conversation at the MacWorld booth, it was shared that central locations would have technicians who would be Apple certified and fully qualified to provide AppleCare repair service. (I am told that is also the case at Apple’s own stores, and if a local Apple Store does not rate a qualified technician, your warranty repair is shipped off to a company store where there IS a qualified technician.)

Where CompUSA came in handy was not so much buying Apple Computers, although I certainly sent clients there on a regular basis for their Macs; it was for all the other things we needed. I can’t expect Best Buy to have as many mice or keyboards or cables or printers or dongles or hard drives or enclosures . . . but they’re already expanding that section at my local store. They’re promising to have most of what we need and we’ll just have to go online for the rest.