CompUSA To Close All Stores

An anonymous reader writes "Mexican telephone and retail magnate Carlos Slim, in a rare defeat, will exit the US consumer electronics market, shutting the last 100 CompUSA Inc. stores after sinking about $2 billion into the business. Gordon Brothers Group, a Boston-based retail store liquidator, will oversee a piecemeal sale of the Dallas-based business, the company said in a statement. Financial terms were not disclosed. Stores will remain open through year-end under the supervision of Gordon Brothers, which will also negotiate the sale of real estate and other assets."

Comments

Meh.

[Vthornheart]

I never really liked them, personally. I don't know if it was different on other regions of the country, but in the Sacramento area the CompUSAs were always overpriced. I guess it's sad to see any store that sells computer products die on some level, but there's better stores still on the market.
That being said, if CompUSA was the only brick and mortar computer store in your area, I guess this would be a sucky development. Maybe a Fry's will move in. ;)

Re:Meh.

[Seumas]

What's stupid is that I'm told by an employee of CompUSA that they've been working on opening a new store in Colorado this coming week. Only, now instead of having a grand opening, the first day the store opens will also be a liquidation day.

It's kind of amazing how fast they did all this. Management got the news Friday afternoon, via telephone. Within a couple hours, there were a couple of guards on premises to make sure employees did not steel anything. Employees were forbidden from buying anything "at cost" which employees apparently have always been allowed to do. By the end of the night, liquidation guys had arrived from corporate and were going through the process of taking inventory and repricing so they could (presumably) begin actual liquidation sales this weekend.

It's just damn crazy. I've never cared for CompUSA except that since there are no longer any real mom and pop independent computer stores around, your choice is between CompUSA and Fry's. And Fry's isn't available in most places (which is a shock to those of us from the west coast when we visit other parts of the country). Without even a CompUSA around anymore, I don't know where you're going to pick up hardware in person? It was always nice to have a place you could go to as a last resort if you needed to replace a mobo RIGHT NOW.

Goodbye

[aero2600-5]

The only thing impressive CompUSA ever did was make the idiots at Best Buy look like geniuses.

Their prices were ridiculous, the staff under-qualified. If you wanted to know what 1994 felt like, all you had to do was wander into one of their stores.

Aero

Re:Goodbye

[Dogtanian]

I don't see how franchising can be bad for a company, since it means it's getting money for its brand. Then you clearly haven't thought about it for more than 5 seconds. If the franchisee(s) aren't up to the standards of the original chain or generally screw things up, they damage the name of the franchise, and that reputation can feed back to the original store.

In short, you lose some control of your own name, and while you can impose conditions on the franchisees, there have to be limits.

Now, the benefit of a franchise is also its disadvantage; people associate the local franchised operation with its original owner, and if this isn't up to scratch, then- at best- people may assume that other franchises are run to poor standards and- at worst- people assume that the original company is responsible and at fault.

"But... but... it wasn't us, it was one of our franchisees" won't cut it in the face of widespread complaints that swamp the ability of your PR to explain the true situation. And do the public care anyway? It's a double-edged sword- if a company is willing to exploit its name (and associated reputation) by selling it to others, it has no right to complain if it's too lax or greedy in controlling the franchise and these actions come back to haunt it.

As an ex employee...

[boredMDer]

Glad to hear that they're shutting down. I worked there for nearly a year on the front end...awesome coworkers and general atmosphere, but store policies, managers, etc, sucked. Bad(ly?). Ripped off customers on return policies, warranties, replacement plans, etc. Restocking fees? At the manager's discretion, of course.

Thank god, is all I can say.

-- 297504 from store 354...

Re:As an ex employee...

[Obyron]

Likewise an ex-employee (store #349 in Lexington, KY). I definitely feel the same about the place going. They treated me, and all the other employees-- up to and including "back end" people like HR and low-level managers (front end, inventory)-- like complete trash. About a year after I was laid off (because the store was losing money) I heard that the then-General Manager had been embezzling money from the store and had finally been caught and fired. No clue if they ever pressed criminal charges. We actually had a lot of good experiences with their warranty, especially the full replacement. They followed it well enough that salesmen weren't unknown to use it to close a sale (ie: "accidentally" break your shiny new PDA two days before your 2 year warranty runs out, and get the dollar value toward the purchase of a new one). The restocking fee always came down to how much we didn't like a particular customer's attitude. There was a lot of stuff that went on to basically screw the customer (like fast-talking old people into spending 100 dollars on getting a tech to "set up" their computer before they took it home, for which the techs just held the computer for 30 minutes before bringing it up front). Given shit like this, and the way the stores were managed, it's no surprise to me they're going out of business. At my store we had probably 6-8 sales people and 4 cashiers working at any given time, and we had 8(!) managers-- General, Sales, Asst. Sales, Front End, Operations, Inventory, Business Sales, and Tech. No wonder they couldn't afford employees! I'm not the least bit sad to see it go.

The good old days

[davmoo]

Back in the day, CompUSA was a decent place to buy computer parts. They had a good selection, knowledgeable sales people, and good prices. Those days have been gone for some years now. It got to where their prices were so ridiculously high without a sale, and the "sale" required a rebate to get a decent price, that it was no longer worth shopping there. Especially when Fry's opened. I haven't been in the local store in 4 or 5 years.

Good riddance

[ricegf]

I purchased a computer from Computer City just before CompUSA bought them out - and it had trouble reading CDs. It was transferred from Computer City's shop to CompUSA's shop, where it languished for 13 weeks while I pleaded, cajoled and threatened. Finally liberated, I fixed it myself with a CD-ROM from Fry's (discovering in the process I didn't need some big box store to build PCs for me).

Fast forward two years. I'm building a new computer, and Fry's doesn't have the graphics card I want. In a charitable mood, I buy one from CompUSA. It doesn't work. I return it to find they've sold out, too - but insist on charging me a 15% restocking fee, even after I complain to the manager. I asked him if he would enjoy my $30 (since it was the last dollar they'd ever see from me), and he simply assured me they would. He never even apologized for the trouble they caused.

I never set foot in CompUSA again.

Perhaps I'm not the only potentially loyal customer they drove away through sheer greed and incompetence.

Guess they should've listened to Maddox

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=compusa_sucks

Now where will I go to get gouged??

[Average_Joe_Sixpack]

I guess its back to Radio Shack

A Question....

[CuriousCuller]

I'm from Europe, so I don't really get it... but please, help me. Why is it that the majority of Americans (and many Europeans to be fair) seem to think that only "Big Name" chain stores can provide these essential services to them? As far as I can see this model seems to cater only for corporate greed mongers, and the crappy service you recieve seems directly related to this. What's was flaunted as capitalism has emerged as an oligopoly of one or two market leaders at best. I read here that people have only 2 stores to choose from in their town, or not even that many. Wow, there's choice in action. Might as well sell only two brands of cola and be done with it. You say "but hey, it's cheaper this way..." and sure, the chain stores might save you a few cents due to their vast economy of scale, but what about everything you loose to tighten the purse strings?

You complain about the service, but greedy corporate chains don't pay much, so who works there? As the old adage goes, pay peanuts and you get monkeys. Moreover, as they're the only store in town you can like it lump it as far as they're concerned. No wonder they treat the public with contempt, we let them. Perhaps its time we returned to the old days of smaller, private stores??? After all, if my business relies on a good reputation and repeat trade I'm likely to offer a good service in return. Yes, things might cost a little more, but then you have to also ask the question about whether you're paying the true cost of anything these days. For example, I live in the Sub-Carpathian region, but amazingly bananas are cheaper than apples in the supermarket! Eh? Same for most products now, be it computers, food, clothes... all the same, someone gets screwed somewhere because the end user is tight fisted. Maybe, just maybe, we have to stop thinking about everything in simple $$$$ terms. People say they saved x number of cents on a product, but wasted x number of hours (and stress) when it didn't work, went wrong etc.

I for one will continue to support my local, privately run computer store. I pay a little more, but I get to talk to a guy who knows what he's on about, can find what I want and competently fix my machine when it's wrong. I save a lot this way, time and blood pressure namely, and as an added bonus I know a decent chap's getting paid fairly for his work. Chain stores will never compete with that level of service, not in a million years.

Changing tactics did them in

[GregPK]

The first thing that built them up as a company. Good salespeople who were paid good commissions. It was typical for people to make 40-50k a year in sales. Even those in software did well.

Then, management(VP's, RM's, DM's) somehow went crazy. Sales were going down a little. So, they started to go crazy on people anytime something was amiss. Maybe perhaps pressure will increase sales, In reality more training and more unity would have.

  Then they bought out good Guy's. They took away the commissions, and fired 95 percent of the sales staff who all ended up in better jobs. This left the incompetants on the floor who really had no motivation to sell other than pressure. They never trained them properly either. Even worse, they all now made about 6-9 bucks an hour. For these people the job was just a fling. Nothing they cared about beyond the next check for booze. Even the ones who did care weren't promoted to a place that they could do anything.

Then, they started to model what good guys had been doing in creating high end selling rooms with pretty fixtures(expensive). However, there were no high end sales people to sell them. So what happened? Duh....

The pay consistently sucked. Good employees where like finding needles in a haystack. Even then, they never respected them if they were good. The management was always overworked. What did they expect? It's like the entire chain suddenly lost vision with the real world.