I worked for years for a domestic consumer electronics company. In the 80′s I shopped for televisions in the Akihabra district of Tokyo. Television were $500 more in Tokyo than Chicago. We were forced to “compete” with an unrealistic price.

Some years later, I worked on the development of the first digital satellite system. The receivers originally cost about $600 and are now about $50. No money is made at these prices.

Circuit City is just another part of the consumer electronics food chain. Many customers just want electronics cheap, cheap, cheap. They were complaining that the prices weren’t low enough at the liquidation sale. The current price structure does not support development and marketing of consumer electronics.

Your suggestions are good and should be fairly obvious to retailers…but implementation will be another story. And for Microsoft, almost everything will be a case I guess of cross-merchandising–building closer ties with certain PC manufacturers and highlighting the best PCs that use their products could be a good move. But it also makes the whole plan that much more complicated with that many more opportunities for things to go wrong (and more hoops to jump through, and more people to sign off on details of each plan…)

Tantillo also had a post a while back about how the electronics market had ignored women for a long time (esp. big retail stores like Best Buy) and had just recently started to make up for lost time. In both cases, it’s a question of actually paying attention to who your consumers are and what they want.

There are two kinds of people who run/control retail stores.
Merchandisers and Accountants.
All of the items you wrote about are the focus of a merchandising attitude.
Accountants focus on cost control and could care less about the products and services.

Guess who is in control?

,dave

“I’m happy to pay a bit more” = You are willing to pay a bit more than the lowest price you can find on the web which amounts to little or no profit margin.

People aren’t willing to pay for a higher quality retail shopping experience. Many folks have no problem doing their research in the retail store and then ordering online to get the best price.

Best Buy has been doing the best job in the sector and surprise, surprise, they are still around.

Apple’s products almost always sell at MSRP so the incentive to order online to get a cheaper price goes away – they are supporting retail like many high end brands do (e.g. Bose,)

- Newer stuff.
that´s the thing. – although the retailers don´t invest much money in displaying stuff, they still need quite some margin, and old stuff is one way to go

- Better-displayed stuff.
- More accessible stuff.
those two belong together. – It´s basically about the money, and to them it appears cheaper to lock down everything to prevent it from vandalism / theft. – It still looks crappy, though. – Somewhere comes the “broken window theory” into play (basically saying that if you dont repair broken windows / abandoned houses in a neighbourhood right away, the downward spiral of said neighbourhood accelerates; as ppl are less inclined to “behave”).
Therefore, I´d say that “casual” thieves, or careless persons, are less likely to rob/vandalize in an apple store, as it´s so well kept w/ upscale appearance and many sales persons on the floor. (therefore, actually, the applestore probably has significantly higher personnel costs, but less damaged / “lost” products costs – I´d love to see how these to add up in bestbuy vs apple)

- Better-priced stuff.
no. Apple sells at full retail price, and only when informed shoppers present a comparable written quote, they get a lower price. – And lots of ppl simply dont care enough (that´s the beauty of selling to the affluent ;)

- A little sense of fun.
typical services at apple stores
Personal Shopping
Workshops
Genius Bar
Youth Programs
and occasional concerts

–
I think it´s almost impossible to pull this off if you also plan to sell computers that run windows. Not selling computers makes it difficult to show off sync features of digital cameras, MP3 and the like.
Introducing a new OS (linux or unix based) could theoretically be pulled of by e.g. HP (which has most if not all of the typical accesories) and thencould start such a kind of stores with a similar user experience as Apple already has. – But I doubt that´ll ever happen

rgrds
matt