Best Buy is considering a switch from its traditional sales-event based high-low pricing policy to the everyday-low-pricing approach (EDLP) employed by Walmart.
According to Bloomberg News, the No. 1 CE chain is reassessing its go-to-market strategy after ceding ground to Walmart and Amazon.com during the holiday selling season. The company is also deeply concerned over the growing popularity of mobile shopping apps that provide in-store customers with instant and virtually universal price comparisons.
The writing was already on the wall last fall, when Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn noted that cash-strapped consumers were only coming out during promotional periods, making business choppy and difficult to plan.
How this all plays out, and what impact the move would have on manufacturers and CE specialty retailing, remains to be seen. But there’s an irony in that Best Buy’s fastest-growing business, mobile, may prove to be a Trojan horse for brick-and-mortar stores.
