New Home Depot concept coming to Audio?


Home Depot just opened a new store in town with a different name - it's called Expo and it's a mega-store for home remodelling and decorating. It has high-end appliances, oriental rugs, etc. My wife, who has been reading about kitchen upgrades for the past year and has tried in vain through different venues to see all the products she has read about can now see most of them in one stop locally. I don't know how the prices are, but if the concept catches on I would think the prices would come down somewhat based on competition and increased sales in this market segment.

I've always wondered if high-end audio manufacturers will ever see benefit in this approach and support it as well. I don't think you'll see a mega-store with only products that you see in boutiques, but the ability to go see a lot of different manufacturers' products in one place, many more than you see in any given high-end shop today, would be an interesting concept to consumers. I suppose the market for $3K ovens is bigger than the one for $3K amps but does it have to be?

I know a lot of high-end shops are falling on hard times, but there are some where business is just booming and it would seem to me that one of the big-time retailers could open a new chain that services the high-end audio / video market and designs stores with display capabilities that go well beyond what we have to choose from today and gain a critical mass of manufacturers. Any opinions? -Kirk

kthomas
I think you're correct about the true high-end of the market - having a mega-store sell $15K tube amps isn't probably a concept that will work. But I guess I'm wondering about a slightly different concept which would be the mass-marketing / mass-retailing of "quality" gear (to stay away from the term "high-end"). Just take speakers for a minute - if somebody put together a retail concept where they had many many major brands of speakers priced from $2-10k and flexible, quality auditioning capabilities and put the store in a high-traffic area, I would think that the concept of $2-10k speakers becoming more commonplace is quite likely. It would require (or cause) speaker manufacturers to at least slightly change their approach which, while quite possibly not being a good thing for already-avid people in audio, would probably result in lower prices based on higher volumes and more competition. I don't think this would work for $25K speakers, but it seems odd that you can spend $5k on an outdoor grill, on a watch, on an oven and, without blinking an eye, on a TV and get all these things through "normal" channels, but $5k on a pair of speakers, while admittedly a major expense, is still viewed as exotic by "the masses".

In the end, I guess I am talking about mass marketing / retailing and that is decidedly different than pursuing the true high-end market. It just seems like there is a significant market out there that could be serviced by a bigger retail influence that would provide (much) higher quality than Best Buy even if it didn't tap the very high-end. -Kirk

Tweeter staff vary. Some are quite clued-in, and come from a high-end background. I have friends that work there that are an example of this. Sure, some of them are clueless, but I've also encountered plenty of cluelessness in high-end stores as well. Tweeter will always only be upper mid-fi at best since that is what sells the most. Some of their product is nice (Sumiko/REL/Sonus Faber) but they don't have any electronics of the same caliber. And, that part of the market makes up a small percentage of their sales.

My friends who work at tweeter and at high-end stores basically loathe the typical audiophile customer: they come in and listen for long periods, are high-maintenance from a customer service standpoint, rarely buy things and when they do they beat them up on price or simply buy used or off the net. Can't say as I blame the sales people. The sales folks seem to much prefer the non-audiophile types who tend to spend more, buy more often, arent' such chiselers, and are easier to deal with.

Any wonder why the high-end shops are falling on hard times... ?
We just had a couple of Ultimate Electronics stores open here. Most of what they sell is Circuit City/Best Buy type stuff, but they do sell Krell, Adcom, and Martin Logan. When I tried to audition some speakers there, the boom-boom from the car stereo section precluded critical listening, even though I was in a separate room with glass walls.
My experience with Home Depot is that the sales staff is extremely knowledgeable. A good perecntage of Home Depot revenue comes from sales to contractors so they have to be fairly well trained. Also Expo is fairly high end (how many of you have $3,000 shower heads?). Still, the analogy between home improvement and audio still doesn't work. I believe that Expo has succeded by and large because in the last ten years of prosperity many people ended up with excess wealth that they reinvested in their homes (home traditionally being the sole investment of Americans). But I think the home improvement craze will subside with the shift back in the market. I really wonder if Expo's sales model will work in a recession. Regardless, while many people can think of fixtures and paint as a capital improvement (and hence, in some ways an investment), I think that it would be more difficult for them to believe the same about speakers.