Best Buy Expanding Apple Watch Sales; CEO Notes Most People Live in States Where Amazon Collects Taxes
Best Buy will expand sales of the Apple Watch to all its 1,050 big-box stores and to 30 of its Best Buy Mobile stores by the end of September, CEO Hubert Joly said on an earnings call. Best Buy has…
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been working with Apple to update the 740 stores-within-a-store that were launched in 2007 to include new and larger Apple displays for iPhones, MacBook computers and iPads, Joly said Tuesday. The Apple Watch went on sale earlier this month at BestBuy.com and in more than 100 brick-and-mortar Best Buy stores, he said. Just as the iPhone 6 launch “was certainly a traffic driver” for Best Buy, the retailer also is “thrilled to have a new traffic driver this year, something very iconic,” Chief Financial Officer Sharon McCollam said of the Apple Watch. It’s “very notable” that 89 percent of the U.S. population lives in states “where one of our online competitors, headquartered in Seattle, now collects the sales tax,” Joly said in obvious reference to Amazon. Three years ago, that proportion was less than half, he said. Joly has been a strong advocate of e-commerce taxation changes on the grounds that online-only retailers that aren't compelled to collect sales tax have, as a consequence, a strong competitive advantage over retailers that run physical stores.