Best Buy wants HP to take back over 240,000 TouchPads

HP's effort to reduce the price of their WebOS tablet in order to drive sales is clearly not going according to plan. Best Buy has only sold about 25,000 TouchPads across all stores and now the company is calling for HP to take back a huge stockpile of the devices.

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The HP TouchPad originally debuted with the same pricing structure as the iPad, asking consumers to pony up $499 for a 16GB model. That pricing quickly fell apart when no one wanted to actually buy the tablets.  Despite dropping the price by $100 on all models, the TouchPad is clearly still not selling.

A source told AllThingsD that Best Buy brought 270,000 units into inventory and states that less than 10% of that inventory has actually been sold. That leaves the company sitting on nearly 250,000 units, and perhaps more if returns aren't being tallied into sales totals. Reportedly Best Buy is tired of trying to move this massive inventory of devices and wants HP to take them all back.

Apparently analyst Rich Doherty from the Envisioneering Group stated to AllThingsD that other stores were having the same problems selling the TouchPad, just like Best Buy. Walmart, Microcenter, and Fry's are all still sitting on inventory of the tablets along with Woot. Woot even tried to sell the device at $120 off the price but that sale didn't exactly result in booming numbers.

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So why aren't consumers rushing out to buy HP's tablet even with a lowered price tag? The issue is two fold. First, with the iPad and Android tablets already on the market it's a hard sell to convince someone to buy into the WebOS based TouchPad. The second issue is that the price keeps dropping. With two cuts so soon after the initial release, consumers are likely thinking they'll just wait because the price is probably going to keep coming down.

Whatever the reason, HP is going to be sitting on a huge stockpile of TouchPads for what seems like a very long time. The only sensible thing to do is to bundle the devices in with new PC sales, otherwise this device may just die before anyone actually owns one.

You've got to wonder if HP is regretting their massively expensive purchase of Palm at this point.

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