Micro Center plan: Give customer reason to bypass Best Buy

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The new Micro Center in the Federal Plaza Shopping Center in Rockville, which has its grand opening Saturday, will carry about 30,000 products, six times more than the average CompUSA store.

A relatively small chain of computer superstores is betting that its philosophy of catering to highly-literate customers will help it succeed in the same Rockville location that CompUSA abandoned eight months ago.

Columbus, Ohio-based Micro Center, which has 21 stores nationwide, will hold the grand opening for its 30,000-square-foot store in the Federal Plaza Shopping Center off Rockville Pike on Saturday. CompUSA closed its store there in February as part of a nationwide purge of 126 stores.

“The reason [CompUSA’s] locations were poor was because a customer has to drive past three Best Buys to get to one,” said Richard M. Mershad, Micro Center president and CEO. “Micro Center started with the idea of ‘How to make a customer want to drive past three Best Buys to get to us.’”

Mershad said the chain can do that by catering to highly literate computer customers.

One of the ways the company will do this, he said, is by maintaining a large parts department aimed at computer aficionados who want to build their own computers. Nearly 15 percent of the store’s floor space will be devoted to a “Build-Your-Own-PC” area.

Plus, it will carry about six times the number of products that CompUSA will, he said. According to CompUSA’s Web site, the average store carries 5,000 products, while Micro Center, Mershad said, will carry about 30,000, including parts and gaming systems.

“In designing the store, the first things we needed to do was find out what people buy, and how they shop,” he said. “If you bought a PC, what were the first two or three items that you would purchase after you bought a PC? So we put a diagram together to say how many steps does it take to get from this product, the core, to the product that attaches to it? That’s how we developed the concept of the store.”

Giving the customers the products will be key if it wants to mine the market successfully.

According to a study by the Mintel International Group Ltd., a consumer researcher, retailers have had to cope with the “breakneck pace of change in the PC sector.”

“Nowadays, consumers want more versatility, portability, integration, style and design,” the study found. “Retailers now need to cope with shorter lifespans for the products, cut throat competitors and increasingly technical and complex machines.”

Judy Harris, assistant professor in the department of Marketing and e-Business at Towson University, said that Micro Center needs to be careful if it is going to try and pick up after CompUSA.

“Their stated mission can’t be to replace CompUSA,” she said. “CompUSA is expanding its selection and trying to compete with Best Buy because they couldn’t make it work the way they were structured.”

The problem, she said, is that the average customer won’t be drawn to a store that deals only in computers or computer products.

That leaves retailers targeting the computer-savvy customer like Micro Center is doing. The pitfall, though, is the Internet.

“These [customers] are the type of people who are likely to be looking for items that are hard to find and will then look for the highest quality at the lowest price,” she said.

If Micro Center can do that, as well as pull the computer user into the store, she said, it stands to make inroads where CompUSA wasn’t able to.

According to Mershad, the company is already starting to do that.

He said same-store sales were up 25 percent and service revenue was up nearly 50 percent between February and the end of the fiscal year, Sept. 30. He declined to disclose exact sales revenue.

Whatever the gains are from CompUSA’s troubles, Micro Center is still far behind the chain in the number of stores.

Micro Center has 21 stores nationwide, including the one in Rockville and one in Fairfax, Va., which opened in 1992.

Even after the cuts, CompUSA has 103 stores nationwide. It kept two stores in Maryland, but only one, Columbia, services the Washington metro market. The second store is in Towson.

Best Buy has six stores in metropolitan Washington and Circuit City has 19.

The Rockville location is the second store Micro Center has opened in 2007, said a company spokesman who did not want his name used because only Mershad is authorized to speak with the press. The company also opened two stores in 2000 and 2002. Between 1991 and 1999 it opened one a year.

“We’re very deliberate when we open stores. We look for the right lease circumstances and that the area fits our core demographic,” he said. “And the Washington area is one that has the demographic — a highly educated work force — that we look for.”

The company, he said, was looking to expand further in the metro-Washington D.C. area, but is looking for the “right location” that meets its criteria.