What's In Store: Thinking Outside The Big Box

New York— As retail competition grows fiercer — for real estate as well as customers — CE merchants have been forced to don their creative caps and devise novel store formats to suit the changing times.

On the following pages, TWICE takes a look at five new design concepts that address the challenges and opportunities in their markets and for their companies. They include:

• Best Buy, which having conquered the strip mall now needs to tame the urban frontier;
• Gateway and CompUSA, which need to integrate new A/V assortments into their PC chains;
• Electronics Expo, a nascent specialty store that needs a niche in the cutthroat New York metro market;
• Macy's, the grand old department store dame that has reawakened to CE and needs a point of entry.

Whether these retail experiments will be fruitful and multiply remains to be seen. But in the meantime, hats off to these innovators for trying.