IBM Product Center was an American

retail Retail is the sale of goods and services to consumers, in contrast to wholesaling, which is sale to business or institutional customers. A retailer purchases goods in large quantities from manufacturers, directly or through a wholesaler, and t ...

er wholly owned by International Business Machines that sold the company's office equipment, which consisted at the time mostly of

photocopier A photocopier (also called copier or copy machine, and formerly Xerox machine, the generic trademark) is a machine that makes copies of documents and other visual images onto paper or plastic film quickly and cheaply. Most modern photocopiers u ...

typewriter A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical machine for typing characters. Typically, a typewriter has an array of keys, and each one causes a different single character to be produced on paper by striking an inked ribbon selectivel ...

s and

personal computer A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or tec ...

s. The first store opened in 1980 in downtown

Philadelphia Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Sinc ...

, Pennsylvania.

History

The Product Center ran concurrent with IBM's Business Computer Centers, which were demonstration and training centers for the company's products established in the 1920s. While these Business Computer Centers were aimed at small and large businesses alike, the Product Centers were aimed chiefly to market IBM's lower-cost office equipment at small businesses and home office buyers. The Product Centers featured bright red carpet and ceiling speakers that played pop music. Its flagship Philadelphia store in 1981 sold just 17 products: several models of

word processor A word processor (WP) is a device or computer program that provides for input, editing, formatting, and output of text, often with some additional features. Word processor (electronic device), Early word processors were stand-alone devices ded ...

s and

s, a POS cash register, a

dictation machine A dictation machine is a sound recording device most commonly used to record speech for playback or to be typed into print. It includes digital voice recorders and tape recorder. The name "Dictaphone" is a trademark of the company of the same n ...

, a Series III

(the Product Center's most expensive product at the time, which retailed $39,000—$ in ) and the newly-released

IBM Personal Computer The IBM Personal Computer (model 5150, commonly known as the IBM PC) is the first microcomputer released in the IBM PC model line and the basis for the IBM PC compatible de facto standard. Released on August 12, 1981, it was created by a team ...

. The IBM PC proved so desirable that it warranted its own table display in the back of the store. The Product Centers later stocked other companies'

peripheral A peripheral or peripheral device is an auxiliary device used to put information into and get information out of a computer. The term ''peripheral device'' refers to all hardware components that are attached to a computer and are controlled by the ...

s for IBM's machines, such as

Tecmar Tecmar Inc. was an American manufacturer of personal computer enhancement products based in Solon, Ohio. The company was founded in 1974 by Martin Alpert, M.D., and Carolyn Alpert. The company's first products were computerized medical equipment ...

tape drive A tape drive is a data storage device that reads and writes data on a magnetic tape. Magnetic tape data storage is typically used for offline, archival data storage. Tape media generally has a favorable unit cost and a long archival stability. ...

add-ons for the IBM PC. Three locations had opened by mid-1981, in Philadelphia,

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, and

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

. By 1986, there were 81 locations, 13 of which were in California. In April of that year, IBM sold all their stores to

Nynex NYNEX Corporation was an American telephone company that served five states of New England (Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont) as well as most of the state of New York from January 1, 1984 to August 14, 1997. History ...

, a company that had spun off from the breakup of

AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile tel ...

in 1984. IBM cited low sales compared to their independent authorized computer dealers in their decision to sell the locations. The existence of the Product Centers had apparently been causing friction with these independent dealers, though IBM had not participated in the fierce

price war A price is the (usually not negative) quantity of payment or compensation given by one party to another in return for goods or services. In some situations, the price of production has a different name. If the product is a "good" in the c ...

s over IBM's products that the dealers were fighting among themselves. In the words of economist Leonard J. Parsons, who had been evaluating the performance of the Retail Centers for a research article in the years before it closed, "IBM decided that it was a technology company, not a retailer". Nynex renamed these locations as Nynex Business Centers and combined their inventory of IBM products with its own

telecommunications Telecommunication is the transmission of information by various types of technologies over wire, radio, optical, or other electromagnetic systems. It has its origin in the desire of humans for communication over a distance greater than that fe ...

equipment.

History

See also

References

Further reading