Will Private Label Brands Work For Best Buy?

As you know I am a negative complaining guy…..I never shopped at Best Buy I guess because of the way I was treated when they first opened. I gave them a second chance yesterday when I bought a cordless phone. I was also looking at the cameras. The guy would match Costco’s prices and also throw in a 2 gig memory card. Costco also will give you a 2 gig card but Best Buy guy says his is better. (is that possible?) Anyway I’m buying it at Costco because they have a 90 day return policy. Best Buy charges you a 15% restocking fee….
Anyway back to the subject. The last few years Craftsman power tools and Kenmore stuff has lost alot of quality. Rumor has is that they tell the manufacturers to build it to look great but use cheap parts. I don’t use Sears anymore. Costco uses their own brand on alot of stuff and it seems to be OK. But I don’t think they’re doing electronics yet. I think it’s best just to stick to the name brands….

Good idea Goose.

As someone that has been in sales of one kind or another for many years (since I was a tenager), I know that ‘house-brands’ serve a purpose.

However, it is important to have a comfort level with a salesperson, who can allay the customer’s fears - and impart real knowledge.

What I mean to say is that there are house brands that the retailer will use, based on a top tier manufacturer’s products, sold at a lower price through guaranteed volume by the retailer to the manufacturer, and the savings due to lowered ad costs - these house branded items are never advertised, and so they can save the customer the 5% usually reserved for ad costs, and perhaps another 5% from the savings passed on from the manufacturer to the retailer.

Then there are less than scrupulous retailers, using 3rd level stuff, and perhaps telling their staff (so that the sales staff is completely innocent of deception) that a first tier product is being sold, at lowered cost because of the reasoning I first spoke of.

It is important to know the difference - I have worked for both types of retailers, and when I found out, in the case of the second what was happening, I never sold those products until I fully informed the customer. This made me lots of money (as I was on commission, and had lots of happy customers) but not terribly popular with upper level management, thus limiting my growth opportunities.

If you know what you’re buying, fine. In the case of Best Buy, their behavior in other areas would make me very wary.

Thanks Marc - great info.

“Brands that if done correctly could give some of other stores like Wal-Mart and Amazon.”

My thoughts exactly, ooooooor not. Maybe you should finish that sentence… I’m sure it was going to be a cliche like… “A run for their money” Go, on.. do it… you know you were going to.

I’m just messing with you… good article - despite the lacking of editing.

The problem really isn’t the label they stick on it, it all comes off the same assembly lines.

The problem is that all of this stuff is being made by slave laborers in China by the lowest bidding supplier, who really don’t care what the quality is.

If your TV explodes and burns your house down, you brought it on yourself the very first time you decided to buy good made by slave labor instead of a quality product that may have cost a little more.

The Apple and Dell laptops that burst into flames weren’t cheap no-name stuff, were they?

I bought a VPR Matrix desktop PC 6 years ago. This was Best Buy’s short-lived brand. I still use the PC and it is as fast as ever (after formatting and reinstalling XP due to registry rot and all). The point you bring up in the article is apparently the reason it was a short-lived brand. The salespeople were accused by HP, etc of pushing the VPR brand over theirs. The thing is, the computer I have was better and cheaper than the other brands at the time and used name brand parts (Nvidia Geforce graphics card, Creative sound card, Intel CPU and motherboard, Western Digital server grade hard drives in RAID 0, etc). In the interest of full disclosure, I did upgrade the amount of RAM and the graphics card a few years ago. Besides the need to upgrade (which all computers have), I am very glad I bought the store brand.

Hello Aaron,

Thanks for the info.