Best Buy To Enter N.Y. In 2000

By TWICE staff -- TWICE, 8/20/1999

By Alan Wolf

Best Buy said it will open its first 12 stores in the New York metropolitan area sometime next year, and upwards of 28 more by 2003.

Though too late to be a factor in the upcoming holiday season, the openings mark its long-anticipated entry into the Big Apple, one of the last untapped major U.S. markets for the specialty chain.

The nation's number one CE retailer has already signed leases for five stores in the New York area, including one in West Nyack, N.Y., where chief rival Circuit City maintains one of some 27 local outlets.

The other four sites are in Woodbridge, N.J., Kingston, N.Y., and the Long Island towns of Westbury and Bay Shore. The stores will range from 30,0000 to 45,000 square feet in size, depending on location, the company said.

"We look forward to providing an entirely new shopping experience to the people of New York," said chairman Dick Schultze. "Our stores and non-commissioned product specialists make it easy and fun to shop for affordable, high-tech consumer electronics and entertainment products." Circuit City, by contrast, maintains a commission-based sales force.

Best Buy's announcement dovetailed with the opening of seven stores in the San Francisco Bay area, its first in that market, leaving metro New York and Portland/Seattle as the only two major regions where the chain has no presence.

Shultze told TWICE last spring that the company had moved its expansion schedule up by one year in order penetrate the New York market within 2000. The effort won't necessarily include a Manhattan location, he said, but would focus on the outer boroughs and nearby New Jersey locales that can better accommodate the stores' big box format. He added that the New York metro stores would be serviced by the company's Ohio warehouse/distribution center.

While the mega-merchant has been encroaching the region with units in Princeton, N.J., and upstate New York, its formal entry into the Big Apple will raise the heat in an already simmering CE market. Besides Circuit, Best Buy will compete with other national heavyweights like Sears, Staples, RadioShack, Kmart and Target, and must also contend with entrenched local favorites The Wiz, P.C. Richard, Tops Appliance City, J&R Computer World and 6th Avenue Electronics.

The first wave of New York area stores are among the 50 to 55 units the chain plans to open nationwide next year.