Interesting times
In these value conscious and web centric times, the last thing you expect to SCAN director Elan Raja (pictured) to find out what the thinking was behind the move.
“We’ve been working on it for just over a year,” said Raja. “It’s a complete make-over; an environment for people who do their research online but want to fulfil in-store. In that way it’s more of an Argos mentality than a PC World one.”
So it looks like some SCAN customers still like to come in to a good, old fashioned retail outlet, have a look at what they’re buying and, perhaps most importantly, walk out with it. Instant gratification.
“The reason we’re able to have a retail outlet and make a success of it is due to our loyal customers – everything is on the back of that. We went against all the odds to get it done,” said Raja.
The store is actually part of SCAN’s headquarters in Bolton. As you would expect of Scan it’s an Aladdin’s Cave of everything high tech and is surprisingly large, as you can see from these photos of the store, published on opening day. “We got a lot of support from all our partners so we’ve got designated areas for specific technologies,” said Raja.
As if immediate access to all this yummy kit wasn’t enough, Scan is looking at other ways to add value for those customers prepared to make the journey to Bolton. “Additionally our engineers are doing training for consumers every Saturday on things like building systems,” said Raja. “A lot of people are buying components on the back of that.”
Talking about components, it was perhaps inevitable that our conversation would move onto the hot topic of the last month: increased competition for NVIDIA from AMD/ATI. You can read Raja’s thoughts on that on the next page.
