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Comment by softbuilder | Hacker News Reader

I was telling someone about Best the other day. They show my hometown store in Sacramento. It looked like the corner had exploded out. I always thought that was just a one-off and it was only that particular store with the weird architecture. I had never been to another Best.

They had a weird business model too as I (barely) recall. You didn't usually go there and buy a product and take it home. It was a showroom for products that were in a catalog. You would order what you wanted from the catalog and then come back a few days later and they would have it for you. I bought a calculator watch there in grade school, which was very exciting. However the experience was so odd, even for that time, that I never bought anything else from them.

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The Best showrooms that were in Northern VA operated in that the store was arranged similar to a WalMart or Target today (rows of shelves), but instead of taking your item from that shelf, you wrote down its catalog number on a slip (an 'order form' as it were). You'd then go up front to stand in line and pay for the items on your slip at a cashier, whereupon the catalog numbers were entered into their system. This resulted in your products arriving up from a basement (or down from a 2nd floor depending on which store) warehouse on a conveyor belt to a 'pickup area' (reminiscent of an airport luggage carousel, only with employees working the conveyor belt). Those employees would then hand your items to you and you would leave with them.

"Service Merchandise" in the Detroit area was like that too.

I believe "Service Merchandise" was nationwide - they used to have a reasonably solid Christmas catalog up into the early 90's. Them and Sears and J.C. Penney's, I would spend hours leafing through them during the Christmas season - so many cool toys.

But at a Service Merchandise they had the showroom items in stock usually. You'd place an order and go to a line to pick it up, right?

(My memory is a little shady. They were around when I was a kid and had gone under by the time I was a teenage).

At least for the Northern VA stores, they had the items in stock such that any 'wait' was only for the stock pickers on the warehouse floor (basement or 2nd, depending on the actual store) to find and deliver the items to the conveyor that took them up (down) to the "customer delivery counter" (my name, I don't remember anymore what Best called the counter where they handed your items over to you).

Argos in the UK had (has? I have no idea) a similar model

It does. I still find it useful because I can check online if they have something or not, reserve it if they do (they text a reservation number), then pay and pick-up in-store within ten minutes. I'm not obliged to buy, they just reserve the item until close of business that day.

And Toolstation. It's not an uncommon model.

Argos also had its start in the 1970's and has been going strong, adapting to the marketplace with no major upsets since then.

Curiously Argos was owned by Big Tobacco for many years. I wonder how helpful that was during a time when retail was far from easy due to inflation, high interest rates, no EPOS and big changes to VAT, import tariffs and other taxation.

Much like how illegal drug businesses have front companies that don't have to make money but allow illegal money to be laundered into the legitimate economy, I wonder if Argos worked like that, enabling their owners to repatriate untaxed earnings. If some type of financial engineering went on then that could explain why Argos survived whereas Best didn't.

Argos was originally a rebrand of the Green Shield Stamps catalogue, I think after Tesco stopped giving out stamps. Co Op stopped giving Co Op stamps about the same time. The Embassy Cigarette catalogue was possibly the last points catalogue survivor!

All the old Green Shield shops became the first Argos shops, and worked very much the same as they always had, just without the stamps. For the first few years you could trade old stamps.

B&H Photo in Manhattan is still like that.

I think high-end photography is conducive to that style of operation, though. Handling the photographic items, and carrying them around the store, would likely lead to damage before sale, if things were left out in the open on the sales floor.

IKEA in France works the same way

Yes, that sounds right. I think the particular case with my watch was somewhat unusual and what you describe was the more common situation.

It's like almost every Apple Store works (when you're buying more than just accessories).

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