Allo everyone. Welcome to, as Welfare put it, the slowest period, huh? I'm not sure if I've spoken about this time of year before, but the post Holidays, and into Spring-Summer period is retail nightmare land. This is when you see us coming up with creative ways to try to bring customers into the stores, when there's unusual sales and offers being presented by corporate partners, because otherwise, you're relying on the last 2-3 months of the year to keep all these other months of barely in black or in the red to stay operating. It's why you see so many shops closing in the retail space, because the hugely skewed nature of our yearly selling period isn't sustainable, honestly. Unless we can make up for the entire year during that window of chaos, we have to hope that during this time we can shave labor hours and make enough sales to justify the staff that is available. For general staff, it's lower key, but also harder to make money, because you aren't guaranteed hours unless you're full time. And I don't know about other stores, but Best Buy only offers a few full time spots per store outside of management... and even supervisors aren't always full time. Try working in one of the mall stores during this time of year. It's a damned ghost town.
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Anyway! Video games are a nice product in that, as long as they are properly supported, there's a regular flow of releases, so you can generally count on consistent customer engagement and purchases. And we've seen great turnaround with the GCU program winning us more retail customers... though it means it eats our profits too. Oh well.
For you guys that are curious about the Switch, I agree with Obliterator. Slightly better average shipments during the month itself, but it's still patchy as hell, and there was no consolidated push to offer a single moment of potency. We sell every single unit that reaches the shelves, just because we still haven't come close to meeting the initial demand by its primary consumer base.
Last month, it looks like that huge push really was nationwide, and super important too, to allow them to get MK8 out to a big push of people. Which seems to be good advertising... but we can't sell them if they're not available.
The PS4 keeps trucking along with a steady momentum, the slim model still consistently the primary seller, but the Pro has done a great job of defining itself as a solid product that attaches very well with customers either buying high end TVs, or previously having done so. Knowing that it exists and the value option there, with the simple and direct value prop it has, has made it an easy sell, as I expected. The sell-share per month still hasn't reached even close to half, the price difference is still to high for that, but it remains a consistent, and encouraging product add to their inventory.
XB1 has really been struggling by comparison though. I think I said something similar last month, but there's just not a lot going on there with it *as it stands now*. They've staked their claim on Scorpio, and a few of my staff are looking forward to that, and I've had questions from a couple of my regulars that are Xbox folks, until we can start taking preorders, I genuinely have no idea how to tell how it's going to do at this point. I mean, let's be clear, the XB1 is still not at Wii U levels, or something like that. It's sold very competitively with the PS4 in the US, but right now it is just selling very weak by comparison.
