BestBuyGeekSquad

Chatter about Best Buy Solution Central surfaced in today’s Wall Street Journal. The Journal says a Best Buy store in Richfield, Minn. — near the company’s headquarters — already has the Solution Central help desk in place. Over and over again, the Journal says Best Buy is trying to emulate the Apple Store experience.

But here’s the key challenge:

The net result: Even if the Solution Central help desk and Geek Squad team answer customer questions, the overall customer experience may not be ideal because Best Buy can’t implement quality control over every product they sell — at least not if they continue to stock so many different items. Also, Best Buy visitors can still take all that Geek Squad advice and guidance, and use it to buy products from online retailers like Amazon.com.

Still, if Best Buy manages to improve the in-store shopping experience, I’d be inclined to open my wallet a bit more frequently there. So I’ll take a wait-and-see approach and look forward to testing the in-store help desks when they launch in New York (my home state).

The Solution Central concept arrives as Best Buy evolves its management team, and digs deeper into the managed services market. mindSHIFT, the company’s MSP business, recently acquired White Glove Technologies — one of the top 100 MSPs in the world.

But questions about Best Buy’s overall strategy remain, and the company’s co-founder recently resigned and is considering strategies to potentially take the company private, according to published reports.