By Best Buy December 5, 2024

The holidays are in full swing, and we've been hard at work ensuring our customers will have a seamless experience, especially with this year's shorter shopping window between Thanksgiving and Christmas Day.

To do this, we've made significant advancements in our supply chain efforts to help customers get their tech wherever, however, and whenever is best for them. With these new, cutting-edge investments, Best Buy is the one-stop-shop for all things tech this holiday season.

"We know how important it is to our customers to get their orders on time and to have the inventory of products they're wanting, especially during the holiday season," said Mark Irvin, chief supply chain officer at Best Buy. "These evolutions in our supply chain allow us to ship orders faster and get products to our customers on time, if not early. Our teams have been working hard behind-the-scenes all year long to help make this gifting season the best one yet."

More ways to get your gifts

The holidays can be stressful, but getting your gifts shouldn't be. That's why we're leveraging our delivery partners to help ensure orders get to customers quickly. We've also improved our inventory placement within our stores, so curbside pickups are ready faster, and we'll have more options for 2-Day, Next-Day and Same-Day Shipping on thousands of items to make sure you get your products before December 25.

We have tons of different ways for customers to get what they need including In-Store, Curbsideand Locker Pickup this holiday. They can also track the status of their Curbside and Locker Pickups through the lock screen on their smart phone after alerting the store they've arrived. And for those customers with large product orders, earlier this year we rolled out a new live tracking feature that uses AI to help give to-the-minute updates on when their delivery will take place.

More products when you need them

We have 20 Delivery Distribution Centers (DDCs) across the country that assist in getting products to customers' homes and help us provide much more reliable and higher quality holiday shopping experiences. They also enable us to offer significantly more options for Next-Day Delivery, perfect for those last-minute holiday needs.

Just in time for the holidays, we recently opened our 20th DDC in Lancaster, Texas. This is our second DDC in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, allowing us to serve the rapidly growing population more efficiently and effectively. The new facility is 800,000 square feet and has more than 80 employees and will help us deliver even more great consumer technology products to customers quickly and efficiently.

Adding automation to increase accuracy

To further improve our accuracy and reliability for customers as well as the productivity and safety in our warehouses, we've begun implementing autonomous guided vehicles (AGVs) in our Nichols, NY Retail Distribution Center (RDC).

Our first rollout is now live, complete with about 20 automated forklifts that handle nearly half of inbound pallets off our delivery trucks. These AGVs provide a variety of benefits for both customers and employees which include:

• Increasing the storage capacity in our warehouse by operating in narrower aisles, allowing us to house more of your favorite tech products and ensuring our customers are quickly getting their orders.
• Enhancing safety and freeing up employees to do more complex, skilled work only humans can do.
• Expanding our hours of operation, which improves the workflow, creates faster delivery times, and allows employees to have more flexible schedules.
• Improving accuracy and decreasing damage by being able to handle products in a soft and predictable manner.

For more information on how Best Buy is getting customers their tech this holiday visit BestBuy.com.