Best Buy's New Showrooming Defense Could Scare Off Legitimate Customers

In an effort to curtail a practice that threatens to destroy big box retailers, Best Buy

has vowed to eliminate showrooming in all of its stores.

The company, which operates more than 1,000 retail locations in the United States, has been hit hard with declining sales,

, and a

. Best Buy attributes some of its losses to a concept known as "showrooming," a practice in which consumers visit a store to examine a product in person but choose to purchase it online. According to the

, Best Buy is not the only company suffering from this practice. Target

reportedly removed the Kindle from its stores after discovering that consumers who saw the device in person still chose to buy it from Amazon.com

. Over the last three months, Best Buy shares have fallen more than 20%, dropping from a year-to-date high of $27.51 on March 23 to $19.48 on June 21. Now the electronics retailer is planning to turn things around, in part by ending the practice of showrooming. According to

, interim CEO Mike Mikan referred to this goal as a top priority for Best Buy. Another one of Mikan's goals is to provide additional training to Best Buy employees in an effort to improve customer service. While the latter effort seems like a decent goal in competing against online retailers (some shoppers prefer the in-person customer service experience), it is unknown how Best Buy might prevent customers from showrooming. One possibility: lasers. The

reports that anti-showrooming lasers could be employed to "thwart" handheld scanners -- most notably those attached to shoppers' smartphones. While this might sound like a promising idea, it is unlikely to keep online shoppers from using Best Buy to their advantage. They could still walk into the store, examine a product, leave the store, and purchase it elsewhere. In truth, that is what shoppers have always done. The only difference now is that there is a whole other retail landscape -- shopping online -- that makes this practice more enticing than ever before. Some have already begun to speculate that Best Buy's employee training program may include showrooming prevention. How that would work, no one knows. But it could mean that employees will be trained to carefully watch and approach shoppers who appear to be showrooming. This may be the only way to cut down on showrooming. But it could also annoy and scare off legitimate shoppers who wish to examine a product

making a purchase.