Best Buy readies for its first area opening Friday.

Byline: RETAIL NOTEBOOK By Joe Mosley The Register-Guard

SPRINGFIELD - Matt Geiss was talking about the car stereo department, but he also was describing a larger Best Buy philosophy.

"We want you to go into the displays and punch a button," Geiss said. "Make it loud. Make it fun."

The electronics retailing giant opens its first Eugene-Springfield store Friday, a 45,000-square-foot cacophony of whiz-bang gadgetry in the new Crossroads Center, at 3306 Gateway St.

Stereos, personal music devices and televisions are set to scream for attention, and even the appliance section is difficult to ignore: the side-by-side refrigerator-freezer with a thin-screen television built into one door, for example.

"It's quiet in here right now," said Geiss, the store's sales manager, during a tour of the facility this week. "But when people come into Best Buy, they know they're in here because there's a lot going on."

The store's 10 a.m. grand opening will include speeches from local dignitaries and $20,000 in donations from the retailer to local children's programs. Best Buy, founded by Richard Schulze in 1966 as the Sound of Music store in St. Paul, Minn., is now North America's largest consumer electronics chain, with more than 820 stores in 48 states plus Canada.The Fortune 100 growth company posted $6.65 billion in revenue and income of $148 million in its most recent quarterly financial statement.

Best Buy is the anchor tenant at Crossroads Center, which was developed by a partnership headed by Springfield developer Richard Boyles on the former Clarion Hotel property, just southeast of the Interstate 5/Beltline Road interchange.

The Springfield store, which will have about 150 employees, is Best Buy's fifth in Oregon. It contains row upon row of racks filled with "media," which includes about 25,000 CDs, 20,000 DVDs and 1,000 computer software titles. It also has a computer department that boasts umpteen gigabytes of combined makes and models; and aisles of vertigo-inducing large- to giant-screen televisions.

But Geiss said the store also is designed to bring some sanity to an otherwise overwhelming shopping experience. The sound booths confine car stereo noise to the car stereo department, for instance, and the acoustic half-walls allow home theater shoppers a full audio-video experience without the distractions of the store around them.

The main thing is for customers to have fun with the merchandise, and discover for themselves what they like and don't like, Geiss said.

`A lot of us (employees), we like working here because we get to play with all the toys,' he said.

"We feel good about what we're doing, and can educate the customers better, too."

Retail Notebook runs on Thursdays. Joe Mosley can be reached at 338-2384 or [e-mail].

CAPTION(S):

Sales manager Matt Geiss fiddles with a flat-panel TV at the new Best Buy. "We want you to go into the displays and punch a button," he said.