Electronics retailer Best Buy coming to Cape

Business Today

Best Buy is scheduled to be completed sometime early this fall, according to Columbia Construction, which is building the 30,000-square-foot building at 3026 William for the electronics giant.

Before 1999, the Minnesota-based company was building only 45,000 square feet stores in large markets. But an incredibly aggressive growth period led the company to realize that when they entered the New York market last fall -- with 486 stores -- they were in every major market in the United States.

Best Buy spokesman Jenny Bohuslavski said that's when the store started slimming down. They wanted to tap into smaller markets.

So they designed a 30,000-square-foot store that would fit into markets with fewer than 250,000 people.

The 30K stores will carry all the same products, Bohuslavski said, just in smaller quantities.

There are currently 30 small market stores and they plan to open 25 in 2002.

Building smaller stores allows Best Buy to continue its aggressive growth spurt. They've opened 60 stores each year for the past three years, and the goal is to be at 650 by 2004.

They've been even thinking about opening a 20,000-square-foot store for smaller markets still.

If the experiment works, Bohuslavski said, they could open hundreds of similar stores in smaller towns across the country.