IBM Product Center was an American retailer wholly owned by International Business Machines that sold the company's office equipment, which consisted at the time mostly of photocopiers, typewriters and personal computers. The first store opened in 1980 in downtown Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
History
By serving retail, walk-in customers, the Product Center differed from IBM's traditional use of salesmen with territories and accounts. The stores 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 processors and typewriters, a POS cash register, a dictation machine, a Series III photocopier (the Product Center's most expensive product at the time, which retailed $39,000—$ in ) and the newly-released IBM Personal Computer. 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' peripherals for IBM's machines, such as Tecmar's tape drive add-ons for the IBM PC.