Fifth Avenue duel: Best Buy vs. Circuit City

NEW YORK -- The duel was set up when Circuit City threw a grand opening this month for its new store on Fifth Avenue, just a step away from its rival.

Although Best Buy is the consumer electronics front-runner, Circuit City didn't shy away from its foe. Instead, the challenger is trying to grab attention with a new store design, called The City.

For consumers, the next-door location of the two stores can have benefits. "It can make it easier to do a price comparison," says Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at NPD Group. And if a product is sold out at one of the Fifth Avenue stores, shoppers can run next door to see if it's available at the other.

The stakes are high for the retailers. This season, 23% of shoppers polled said they planned to spend money on consumer electronics, compared with 17% who said they would buy apparel, according to a Discover Card survey.

On a recent wintry day, Phil Lee, a tourist from London, was checking out the computers on the second level of The City store. He had stopped in at Best Buy first, and he said he could see a difference.

"This is nice and accessible," he said about The City. "It's more like a modern Apple Store. Best Buy is more of an old-style shop."

Circuit City executives consider the new store a test format, and they say they don't yet know what pieces of it they'll keep and what they'll change.

But the company already has similar test stores in six other cities. The City stores are all smaller and less costly than the traditional Circuit City big boxes, even though the selling area is almost identical in the new and traditional stores, experts say.

Many products, such as cameras and phones, are easy to see on circular countertops. And sales associates, even if they are new employees, can easily answer customer questions because they use tablet PCs with information stored on them. That allows them to move from one product area to another.