The fact that Best Buy, the largest electronics retailer in the World, has decided to buy Carphone Warehouse has been a big news story in all the media.

And rightly so, as Best Buy opening up in the UK will affect every one of us.

The newspapers have focused on the deal with Carphone Warehouse and largely ignored the fact that Best Buy is a huge operation with 150,000 employees that already operates in Canada, Mexico, Turkey and even has 152 stores in China. It has a £20 billion turnover and did not need to raise any loans to finance this deal paying £1·1bn in cash for a half share in Carphone Warehouse.

The deal aims to accelerate the growth of Carphone Warehouse’s European and US operations and to introduce Best Buy Stores across Europe.

Best Buy outlets in America are called “the big box” as they are massive buildings that are generally finished in a deep brown colour with a bright blue front.

Best Buy is a very creative company and many of its ideas, like “The Geek Squad”, have been copied over here. It majors on stocking all types of electricals in depth and it strives to give complete customer satisfaction while offering “Best Buy” prices.

Suffice it to say that none of the UK multiples presently match its standard of service, but the Mediamarkt and Saturn stores in Germany do come close.

A great deal of thought has gone into creating this very successful company and I will try to outline some of its methods here.

Best Buy and Tesco both use the Dunnhumby marketing company (see www.dunnhumby.com for details) to carefully track and report the buying habits of customers, so that they can be retained with “targeted” exclusive offers.

This “relevance marketing” flows over into the layout of the stores, which are designed to fit in with the Dunnhumby concept of “customer- centricity.”

Best Buy stores are usually over 30,000 sq ft and the ones I have visited have a central communications centre and several easily defined areas that are devoted to a particular type of customer – thus taking the centricity concept a stage further.

One area would be completely given over to small business, another area would be devoted to deliberately attracting mothers keen to equip their children with new technology, a third would be laid out to attract young males, while another would be set aside to cater for customers who want the very best top-end products.

The current new wave of home with wireless networks is ideal for Best Buy as the staff, who earn no commission, are trained to remove “techno stress” and to emphasise that Best Buy delivers, installs and maintains everything from a washing machine to an “everything connected” home.

Best Buy also has a very modern attitude to running the head office. It operates on the ROWE principle.

ROWE stands for “Result Only Work Environment”. There are no set hours and often staff do not come into the office at all. The employees themselves decide where and when they get the job done.

The only yardstick for evaluating employees is whether they meet their productivity goals.

ROWE employees tend to stay with the company and when workers change to ROWE their productivity jumps up by 35 per cent.

I will reveal Best Buy’s biggest secret next week.

We are heading for very interesting times in electronics retailing.