According to a recent presentation during the company’s Analyst Day event today, Best Buy announced that it will be adding both sales clerks and in-store sales desks to deal exclusively with the videogame department in all of its locations this fiscal year.
The presentation was performed by senior VP Chris Homeister and stated the focus on gaming is part of a "drive toward number one industry position" in the game software market. Currently Best Buy is behind both GameStop and Walmart in revenue sharing, but the company hopes to change that by adding "dedicated, informed, and engaged employees focused only on gaming."
These new employees will perform similar duties like those at GameStop such as recommending pre-orders and encouraging customers to purchase "exclusive digital add-ons." They will also be tasked with working behind the new game desks, which according to the presentation will "create the destination for trade, preorder and digital offers."
Store interiors will change as a result of the new emphasis on games, as each game department will expand and cause a reduction in the size of each music department in order to compensate.
Best Buy also tried to show that it will differentiate itself from rival GameStop by claiming that it will allow trade-ins to be used "for any category of products." The changes are set to drive what the company is calling a "virtuous cycle" of pre-orders, followed by game purchases, followed by digital content purchases, followed by trade-ins, followed by trade-in credits being used to start the process again from the beginning.
