In a smart mood, Gateway has decided to close down all of its retail locations having recently acquired eMachines. This will lay off around 2500 Gateway employees, but did result in a stock increase after the announcement. Gateway is in a hurry too, forecasting complete retail shutdown in just under two weeks.
Rather than have Gateway specific retail locations, Gateway is planning to start distributing their products at standard retail distributors like Circuit City, CompUSA, and Best Buy. They will NOT however be maintaining inventories at these locations. Rather, shoppers will customize their new PC’s at these locations, and have them shipped to their homes, from the Gateway assembly location within 48 hours.
We’ll see how this new strategy plays out in the coming months as Gateway continues to gain a foothold in the consumer electronics market (Plasma TV’s, Home Theater, etc.)
Makes perfect sense when you think about it. They dont have to pay for help... or rent out the myriad of locations they had. As long as people can still go to a CompUSA and actually see one of their computers in action, rather than just putting it together on the internet and looking at pictures, which (despite my Alienware) i find to be a troublesome and bad way to do business, they should only make MORE money. At least it would stand to reason that they would. Who the hell knows with people. The true silver lining to this bit of news is that they wont have anymore of those irritating commercials describing Gateway's new "I need a good computer so i can store my downloaded porn and play videogames while i eat bowl after bowl of CoaCoaPuffs" Sale... or whatever they're called. PS... Catholics Blow.
Posted by: Andrew | Sunday, April 04, 2004 at 12:58 PM