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CompUSA Closing More Than 50 Percent of Stores
Zurbrick writes to tell us that CompUSA hs announced that they are closing the doors on over half their stores over the next three months. "CompUSA said in a statement it would close 126 of its stores and would receive a $440 million cash capital infusion, but it was not specific as to the source of the cash. The company also said it would cut costs and restructure. The company operates 225 stores, which its Web site says are located in the United States and Puerto Rico. "
I guess that's just Louisiana. We're keeping our Baton Rouge and Metairie locations, but we can't get a Fry's or an Apple Store to save our lives.
I guess that's a good demonstration of the mean intelligence level here. People would rather go into ChumpUSA and be abused by surly salespeople than order something online to save a few bucks.
Here on the east coast, we don't have fry's electronics. Where i'm at, the nearest circuit city is in the next city, the best buy usually has like 3 video cards, 1 sub-par motherboard, and approximately 23 hojillion music cd's, dvd's, and washing machines.
For all its shortcomings, when my hard drive failed, i went to compusa to get back up and running the same day, when the 9700pro didn't offer an oem, compusa ran a special that was cheaper than the internet in general (same price + shipping). With a corporate buyer, they beat the other big box stores in both volume pricing and responsive service (usually 2-3 account reps on staff in the one by work).
Reasons why i'll miss it aside, I've gotta say that compusa is failing for a reason. The corporate office treats its parts, employees, and customers as commodities. Refunds are a pain if its open box (like a laptop keeps overheating, you gotta take it in 3 times, and the 4th time it fails you get a refund), the repairs are shoddy and if its dll hell, rather than find and replace the dll or do some other moderately advanced repair, they'll charge you 200 bucks for a reinstall of windows, provided you still have the disks. The employees will rarely be honest or knowledgeable about if a product is in stock, and most likely will say yes just to get your hopes up and you in the door.
I've also heard stories where the cashiers are told to cheat the sales people out of commissions for big computer sales, where they'll "forget" to punch in a 3 digit code that signifies bonus to the sales rep. No wonder you get minimum help for minimum wage.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
First Computer City, now CompUSA. We have 2 CompUSA stores within a half hour so hopefully one will survive. I find CompUSA has always had a much wider selection of computer parts like video boards, drives, networking gear, etc. And their sale prices are often excellent. For example their hard drive sale prices are usually very competitive with the best mail order prices. Ditto for memory and video boards. I think their downfall was getting into home theatre gear like flat screen TVs and such. Every time I have checked out their TV offerings I have found them sorely lacking. They are over-priced and, worse, their displays are not properly configured. Most of their display TVs have poor picture adjustments and they almost always have incorrect aspect ratios. They are a tech store; they should know how to set these things up. It's pathetic. Hopefully they will get back to their roots, which is computers, computer accessories and software, and leave the home theatre, cell phones and digital camera gear to others.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
I'd bet that the atlanta CompUSAs lost a lot of business to that newish fry's
kind of surprising that they're all going away though, the one by lenox mall was damn convenient when i didn't want to drive all the way out to fry's...
From this article: The closings will leave 103 stores. Nunez said CompUSA said the restructuring will include receiving $440 million from Mexico City-based parent U.S. Commercial Corp, a holding company controlled by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
The $440 million came from its parent company. My friend works in a CompUSA and received a memo about the cash infusion a couple weeks ago. He asked me if that meant there was anything to worry about and I said "no, don't worry, that means they're investing more the expand the business, it happens all the time." So, this morning I got a phone call..."hey, remember when you said not to worry?!"
Here is some hot news for you...almost all of the inventory is going up on eBay for pennies on the dollar.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Okay, PC World is not a lovely company that's nice and whatever, but i'd buy from them any day over Dell. I've been working in a store for 1 and a half years (Student job, nice pay for retail) and i know where they're dodgy and where they're not. Yes, you can get a lot of stuff really cheap online, but like Amazon, they don't have the overhead of real stores. The PC margin is small, often no more than 10% which may not even cover the time paid to the guy helping you, the profit does come from stuff like cables, inks and peripherals, but that's how the PC market has worked and still works.
Let's just say: £80 network cards (that was apparently the cheapest)
I've been selling £7 NICs for ages, most expensive i remember was a Gigabit card that cost about £20.
£20 USB cables (again, the cheapest)
Nope, cheapest is £10, although the standard 2.1 metre cable is £14.99. I agree, that's expensive but you can just go to Maplin and buy them there, i often tell people about that. Cables are the place where you get ripped off most, with network cables costing £9.99 for 1 metre and most people can spend well over £20 on a long cable.
£1,200 PCs. They stock cheaper ones but I've never met anyone who ever bought one
You what? We only have 1 PC at the moment going for £1,200 and it's a beast by Packard Bell, it's trying to be like a custom-PC with a side window and lockable front and case. Frankly, 90% of the PCs i've sold are under £600 with quite a lot of people going away happy with a £300-£400 PC.
And extended warranties which cost 70% of the value of the PC, yet are serviced by spotty 16 year olds who wouldn't know a PC if it dropped on their head.
Extended warranties are PAYG and about £8/month, now i know that's not cheap but it does cover anything that goes wrong with the thing. With that your PC gets taken away and repaired by proper techies, you don't get the guys that work in the store servicing PCs under the warranty.
I'm a computing student at Imperial College London, i got my friend hired who's also a computing student, his cousin works there (again into PCs), and the tech guys actually know what they're talking about. Now our store might be a wonderful exception to the norm, but come in when we're on shift and you won't get bullshitting from us.
I shop CompUSA - although I'm not a great customer - I shop the rebate sales and actually complete the rebate paperwork, and no, I don't buy the regularly priced merchandise while I'm there.
:)
I find that they don't consistently post pricing for items, and their customer service is terrible. Ever order over the web for in store pickup? I keep going to the store hours after placing the order and then waiting in line for the management to task a sales clerk to go fetch the products from the shelves. Ick.
They don't know their products, nor do they know where the inventory is, they advertise products at a cheap price that are sold out when I arrive 2 hours after store opening (and when their inventory system says that they have items in stock.) They have been doing an awful job of meeting the market needs, and this is what happens in a competitive market.
I hope that a well stocked, fair priced alternative arrives. Shockingly, I'd pay more for good quality products, skilled sales people, and efficient customer service when I go to a store. I concluded long ago that this was out of the question for CompUSA, and decided to work the angles for cheap after-rebate merchandise from them while waiting for them to collapse.
It's the old Montgomery Wards -> Sears story repeated a hundred years later. Wards was a huge mail order powerhouse, but were upstaged by technology and marketing powerhouse Sears when they didn't adapt to new technology and business models in time. Of course the same thing happened to Sears, too.
Good by, CompUSA. Hello Buy.com, NewEgg, and Fry's!
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
I don't go to CompUSA much any more--It's downtown and there is a BestBuy, CircuitCity and Staples nearby, but I always thought that CompUSA tended to be a lot cheaper than BestBuy and CircuitCity.
I really don't ever expect help from any tech salesperson, but I can't imagine them being less knowledgeable or helpful than BestBuy (although I have to admit that BB's salespeople are always bugging you, so at least if you need to get into a locked case you can.
What I do remember from CompUSA is they used to have fantastic sales. at BB if a $32 product goes on sale, it always seems to be for $29.99 at best.
CompUSA sales often featured products at 40% or half off. The first week a game was out, I used to always look for it in the CompUSA flier because they always seemed to have a great sale the first week--like $30 for a new $50 game.
On top of that, with all these stores I couldn't find a single decent hard-drive enclosure, CompUSA had a dozen to choose from, and I know that there are many other components I won't find at any of the others..
If our Spokane store closes, we're going to have to travel 500 miles to Seattle to get decent computer parts, or we'll have to pay BestBuys terribly inflated prices for what little they do stock.
Strangely enough, Staples has decent sales. I consider that my best alternative, bought a 20" LCD monitor there for under $140, but the selection is probably the most limited.
Hmph
if it's not on this new list, it's closed:
this list
To help the people that are not from the US, Radio Shack's tag line is 'You have questions? We have answers'. Hope that makes the parent post appear funnier.
All views my own. Anyone else with the same views needs to have his/her head examined.
A few people have commented that they attribute this to the steady death of brick-n'-mortar stores due to internet vendors undercutting them. Let me tell you a story that should illustrate the (lack of) truth of that idea...
10-15 years ago, back before our favorite set of tubes made online shopping easier than physical shopping, my friends and I used to have a game we'd play (when very, very bored).
Back then, geeks had a huge thick magazine full of nothing but mail-order ads (I think it might have had some content, but no one read it for anything but the ads) called "Computer Shopper". Need a computer? Check the CS. Need a video card? Check the CS. Need a printer? You get the picture.
Anyway, CompUSA carried this magazine. So, my friends and I would go to CompUSA, grab a Computer Shopper, and start playing as follows:
We would walk around, comparing in-store to mail-order prices, looking for the worst deal in the store (and of course, correspondingly, the best deal in the magazine). The person who found the best worst deal (ie, the highest markup over the lowest mail order price) after an hour (or when we got thrown out) won.
CompUSA's average prices usually came out to roughly double what you could get the same thing for in Computer Shopper. The "winner" of the above game usually managed to find something in the 10-20 times more expensive range.
CompUSA won't die because the internet undercut them. It should have died years ago from simple competitive market forces, and having held on so long says a lot for the saavy of the average tech consumer.
Yep, and if you're going to order, might as well go somewhere like Microbarn:
14 foot patch cable, $1.99
Microbarn doesn't have the selection of rapidly-obsolete gear (like hard drives and system boards) that somewher like Newegg might, but their prices are great for the stuff they do carry, especially for things that should be cheap, like cables.
But yeah, all the retail places these days are carrying high mark-up stuff like Belkin. (Price aside, I won't touch Belkin because of the stunt they pulled a few years ago where their routers would periodically hijack HTTP requests.)
-- Alastair
I'm a moron and forgot to edit it properly. My bad.
Long Beach, CA (PCH) (Store # 175)
6310 East Pacific Coast Hwy, Long Beach, CA 90803
San Mateo, CA (Store #728)
41 West Hillsdale Boulevard, San Mateo, CA 94403
Mesquite, TX (Store #127)
1515 Town East Blvd. #168, Mesquite, TX 75150
Skokie, IL (Store #177)
7011 Central Ave., Skokie, IL 60077
There ya go.
Harm
Back when the Pentium was state of the art machinery, I brought our computer (we only had one cause they were kinda pricey) to CompUSA to get some RAM added. We were called the next day to pick it up, and for a while, I was kinda impressed how they didn't break the warrenty seal sticker on the side of the case (It didn't dawn on me they might have spare stickers). Got it home, powered it up... no change in the RAM size, but it didn't stop them from charging my credit card. I brought it back and asked them to explain what they charged me for. Guy behind the counter looks at my bill and says "We added 64Mb of RAM". The case still had the ORIGINAL STICKER that said 64Mb of RAM inside. That schmuck had the audacity to tell me I was running my PC for weeks with NO RAM, and I paid them to put in 64Mb of their RAM. I had them open it up and show me where their RAM was. As soon as the side of the case came off, the first thing my eyes locked on to was my dusty RAM chips... I wanted to see him explain how/why they put in dirty RAM in my box. I told them to either give me my money back, or put the RAM in since I already paid for it (receipt was in my hand). Guy goes in back, comes out 5 minutes later with "We don't have the kinda RAM you need" (PC33 or whatever was the only kind back then) and refunded my cash.... no apology.... no admission of guilt. After that, I figured a PC is like a car... it's better to take care of it yourself, lest some monkeys fidget with stuff they don't understand. K-Mart went bankrupt for similar reasons... not being honest to customers.
I saw this post and thought it didnt ring well, so I popped down the road to check at my local PC World -
Cheapest Network card: Dynamode, £6.99
Most expensive Network card: Dlink, £34.99
Cheapest USB Cable: 3 meter, £5.99
Most expensive USB Cable: 10 meter, £19.99
PCs: Yes, there are cheap £349.99 PCs in store, but the following one caught my eye - £479.99 AMD 64 4000 Dual Core, 1GB ram, 160GB hard disk, wide screen 19" monitor
The 'spotty 16 year old' actually turned out to be a well dressed 20ish year old who was very knowledgeable, took my 'needs' and pointed me to the above system while informing me of some pretty good reasons why it was better than the basic £349 PC - as an IT professional I couldnt fault the reasons either.
Why do a hatchet job on PC World when it hardly ever deserves it? Ive had brilliant experiences with them and while they dont have the best prices, they are competative when time is a factor.
Packard Bell's brand name has changed hands a few times, gone under a few times, been brought back a few times. From what I hear, they aren't the absolutely abyssmal garbage they were pushing back in the early 90's...
Probably not far from it though
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
I just called the store nearest me, which is closing. The associate explained to me that starting tomorrow, they will implement "progressive pricing" and their prices will get lower and lower until they close. The closing date of that store is in the next 60-90 days.
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I agree with you on the weird stocking practices---and it's true here in Silicon Valley as well as online and abroad. For example, when I ask why the shelves are empty of some item in the supermarket, the clerk says something along the lines of, "well, we don't sell many of them". Duh! You won't sell many if you're always out of them!
P.S., For more electronic selection, try Halted (HSC) in Santa Clara.