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Geeks.com Online Shop Has Closed
Duggeek writes "After 17 years, one of the best kept secrets in shopping, Geeks.com, has shuttered its online doors. Myself, I have a small book of sales orders from years past. According to the latest announcement, that stack will not be growing any larger. Quoting: 'Our vision has always been to provide the geeky tech consumer an alternative avenue to purchase quality refurbished and new techy products and gadgets. That vision was the cornerstone of our slogan "Best Deals Every Nanosecond." Unfortunately after a lot of difficult consideration the owners of Geeks.com feel we are unable to come through on this vision any longer. There are many why's... The e-commerce landscape, as well as the consumer electronics market, has changed dramatically with intense competition and a 1000lb gorilla (do we really need to say who) competitor that can lose millions of dollars to buy customers and suck up inventory. They can lose money with impunity, supported by the stock market. We cannot.' The landing page of their website now goes directly to this announcement; the storefront is switched off. They maintain a Facebook page where a combination of remorse and surprise is rapidly growing. The letter also asserts that they will fulfill all business obligations to online customers during their transition to both a solitary, brick-and-mortar presence in California and a wholesale division, Evertek. Personally, just about every keyboard in my closet was purchased from them, and another box full of USB devices as well. Five of my PC builds exist because of them. Feel free to share your own memories of the former Computer Geeks Discount Outlet."
Damn, I never heard of it before, it never showed up in my searches for parts.
Hint, you can't have a successful business if you don't tell people about it!
Word of mouth only works for drug dealers.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Wow. It has been well over a decade since I last visited the computer geeks site, and I assumed they had been gobbled up by a retailing giant. Their cheesy graphics and great deals on 802.11B PCI cards will be forever etched in my memory, along with my boxed copy of Netscape for my PowerPC Mac. It just goes to show that the internet was not the open retail playing field many assumed it would be.
I bought my DEC Alpha Multias from them... Same machine Malda started Slashdot on. I had two...
Also got a couple of nice Seimens-made web-terminals, which I converted to low-noise firewalls with Astaro.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
and couldn't find any horn rimmed glasses held together with sticking plaster.
Can someone elaborate an opinion on the "1000 lb gorilla" mentioned as being able to "lose money with impunity supported by the stock market"? I'm not sure what this refers to and am puzzled by the meaning of these statements.
I was ordering from there where it was CompGeeks.com
They always had the coolest sell outs and unique, unexpected, weird items. Just whatever they stumbled across. I bought an IBM CRT monitor back in the day with unpowered Bose speakers in it, of course there was a proprietary IBM connector. They actually had a how-to on their website to wire your own standard connector up (and would do it for a fee). Found an amplified sound card, awesome sound.
Cheap monitors for the Japanese market, they sold LCD's for a fraction of what other people did when few people had LCD's due to some inventory error somewhere.
I think I paid $2 for a briefcase bag I used for a long time.
I can't remember everything I bought from there, but they always had awesome service.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
You don't shutdown, you adapt: newegg, amazon, sears and even walmart adapted to the ebay model, so now sellers can sell their own merchandise on amazon and newegg and buyers don't even know the difference. Only way you can tell is it says "item provided by $SELLERS_NAME" somewhere. That way geeks.com wouldn't need any merchandise, they would just operate the domain and hosting and take a percentage of every sale.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
I'm angry and sad at the same time.
First purchase was made back in 2001...pair of Benwin speakers....still with me this moment on my desk. Been a customer ever since. Even did many a purchase on behalf of the school district.
Too, too bad.
Does anyone else know of a good online fire-sale type vendor like CompGeeks?
I discovered them years ago and bought from them both for myself, but also companies I worked for. Their customer service was great. All the best with the store front.
The mega corporations are buying up or pushing out of business all the small businesses. I recently sold by house and moved and in process used a lot of local businesses. Talking with them most were saying they will probably be gone in 3-4 years. The big corporations are cutting deals with cash strapped cites for major concessions that are driving the little guys out with extra fees, permits, and licenses.
I wanted to buy another of those Antec USB power adapters. They are really nice and work well in my car plugged into my 750w power inverter. (Those damned car-power adapters just suck and usually top out at 0.5a which isn't enough for my tablet which draws more power than that from its battery.
I guess I'll end up paying more elsewhere.
Well there's your problem right there...
...is that it all comes from one warehouse location there in Oceanside. I worked for them for a short time as a temp. It was a less than fond experience, but that's beside the point. All merchandise for the 3 arms of the company come from the same stock. I forget what the 3rd company name they sold under was, but the items you bought under geeks.com was the same stuff you bought "wholesale" under evertek.com. I can only guess at why they feel the need to end the online arm of geeks.com if the store part will remain open, and the other arms (if the third still operates) use the same pool of stock. I will say this, they sold a lot of things that I wouldn't bother going to Newegg for because it would cost more.
Yes, but after she was finished, did they give you the seven monitors or not?
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
I can't remember how long I've been a Geeks customer - years. I've bought laptops, CPUs, memory, and miscellaneous hardware from them over the years. They were always a great place to check when you needed an older or oddball piece of hardware - often times they had it. Great service, great people.
You will be missed.
-- "Never underestimate the power of human stupidity." - R.A.H.
I was really sad to get email they were closing down been a customer since the dawn of civilization.
But then they mentioned evertek.com and WTF it is essentially the geeks site and inventory just with a different skin.
I'm assuming he means Amazon.com. Newegg is big, but hardly a 1000lb gorilla, and there really isn't anyone else major selling anything online. Amazon's investors are basically taking a huge loss right now with the assumption that Amazon will be the next Walmart. e.g. you'll get everything from them and when that happens they'll jack up prices.
Makes me wonder what America's going to do. Amazon and Walmart are putting the last of the mid sized companies out of business. They're already show that when that happens prices go way up (Amazon did it for books, Walmart does it in every market they take over). Are we gonna suck it down and just live worse or will we regulate them with the gov't?
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I haven't bought from them in ages. Seemed anytime I went there lately they just had old refurbished junk and the prices weren't even that great compared to what you could get that stuff for off ebay.
Nothing i have to say is worth saying.
I extended a computer for about two years because I was able to pick up a P4 Extreme Edition CPU (Original List Price $1000) for $79. That was the most stable computer I ever had and was smoking fast in the day. Geeks will be missed.
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
I actually just sent something back to them recently and was waiting for its replacement to ship. I see they plan to honor such liabilities, so I should still see the replacement come. Nonetheless, I was planning to purchase some additional items from them soon and now that clearly won't happen as I live a couple thousand miles away from their store. I guess it's back to Microcenter for me...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Why do people persist to offer second hand stuff cheapest on eBay and Amazon? I am not referring to the cheap Chinese sellers who flood the market with first-hand but second-rate good-enough stuff, but people who for some reason decide that the only place that you can offer older stuff is Amazon/eBay, and if you also have a web site, to charge MORE on that web site - even though it is trivial to get a payment processor who will take way less of a cut.
So... reasons, please?
They didn't become mega corps by being " best kept secrets in shopping". There's been a lot of this on /. where some little known entity is shutting down their website or closing their doors. I think too many people actually believe in the field of dreams, but I am sorry, just because you build it, they aren't necessarily going to come, unless you tell them about it.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
I've been purchasing from them for years. Even with myself, it was true I'd forget about them for periods of time while ordering on Amazon. But then I would rediscover it. Bought a lot of electronics off them over the years. Makes me feel like an asshole for buying from Amazon....
including the last one which is on its second return waiting for a refund
good riddance to the garbage peddlers
I keep hearing this argument. That we shouldn't use the gov't and democracy to better our lives because the corps will abuse it. Newsflash, they already _are_ abusing it. Seriously. You have absolutely nothing to lose here. There's only to possible outcomes there. Does it really matter if the jackboot at your neck is a Free Market Jackboot (tm) or belongs to the gov't. At least with the gov't option you had a chance...
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I should have placed another order last month. I need a few things.
I loved Geeks.com, for buying extra cables for internal builds, tiny mice for laptops, hard drive mounting brackets, and all these little things you need to keep in stock for builds. My current graphics card (GTX460 for $90) and laptop mouse came from geeks.com.
If the owners are reading this, thank you guys for the good service over the years. I've been recommending you since 1999.
If you start up a leaner or updated business model, send out an email to your former customers and let us know.
if we're willing to accept solutions to the problems that creates. I see two problems: 1. lost jobs and 2. price increases when competition goes away.
/. in your spare time you're not one of those lucky few. ).
Basically, the modern capitalist economy breaks down in the face of progress. I realize it's hard to get past that realization. In school I was never taught even the concept that there were alternatives to Adam Smith style 'competition makes everything better' capitalism. I don't mean I wasn't taught competing systems, I mean the notion that there _were_ alternatives wasn't taught. Capitalism was and is a tautology.
Automation is making labor obsolete. It's taking longer than we expected. Some things turned out to be trickier. But it's happening. So what are we gonna do? We still want all this stuff (books, movies, appliances, etc). The first world got by for 20 years or so by sending our slums to China. But we're running out of work. Foxconn's using robots now. China's losing out to poorer East Asian countries. We're all in a race to the bottom.
Given that our entire society is built around a 'if you don't work you don't get to eat' model, I really only see two options. Socialism and redistribution of wealth or abject poverty for all but a lucky few. (BTW, If you're reading
I'm open to alternatives, but all the ones I've heard from my libertarian buddies are either pipe dreams where people share their wealth in ways they have no reason too and never have in all of civilization, or just boil down to a round about way of achieving socialism. When I point that out they usually change the subject or just say 'well, screw it, I got mine. Let 'em die'.
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That's no excuse. It just makes it that much harder to do cost analysis. Sorry. All your "I'm a b2b site" chest thumping doesn't mean squat. If I'm a purchaser, especially a bulk-purchaser, I'm expected to do some comparison. That means going through log-ins on all your stupid sites, instead of being able to automate it in some sane way. Electronic stock exchanges quote slightly different prices that get arbitraged away, and that business doesn't hurt, so the idea that price transparency will hurt your business doesn't fly with me. It's just a nuisance to customers.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
They can too. If you have inventory, and you can sell it for more than you bought it for, you should be OK. Or even eBay. The last thing I bought on eBay was a random part to fix my clothes dryer from a seller with many thousands of good feedback. Get started!
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Nothing of value was lost.
Well, for you, me, many others...
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
... until today. So are they gonna ride on the Slashdot Effect fame, now?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
"Best kept secret" + "retail outlet" = "closed business"
If the people you want as customers don't know you exist, you won't have the customers you want and your business will fail. It is that simple
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
I had heard of them before. I had even bought things from them. Sad to see another potential supplier drop out, but to be honest I had not bought from then in years and had lost interest. While I had not even looked lately, the good deals and interesting items were getting fewer and fewer when I stopped shopping there. And they seemed to use shipping as a profit center, not just to cover shipping costs but to make a bit extra there. So you had to factor that in when you saw what at first looked like good deals.
As to not having heard of them before, I have to say that it is absurd the way that we are being tracked and marketed to by the likes of Google. There are other sellers on the web that I had never heard of before, until after I did a web search for a particular item and happened upon them myself. However, once I started browsing their website and buying from them, it seems that I can hardly visit any website without seeing ads for the company. Worse, those ads are custom tailored to show me the exact items that I already looked at from that vendor (in some cases, items I had already bought). They sell tens of thousands of items and I'm only shown the items that they or Google know that I'm already aware of!
They would be far better to maximize their advertising dollar by telling Google not to keep barraging a loyal customer with ads for things he already know they sell. Either show him something new or, better yet, spend finite advertising money to put those ads up for others on the Internet who may be visiting and shopping with their competitors and don't even know they exist. If Geeks was spending advertising money with Google (and I don't know if they were or not) then they likely were only keeping their face in front of people who already knew about them and had visited their site recently. Not the best way to get the word out and find new customers.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I suspect one of the real points to this article is to let interested buyers know that the domain name may be for sale soon (to pump up the price). I'm sure that is one asset that has greatly appreciated over the years.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
It doesn't work that way. If you're "a purchaser" you're only comparing prices from the handful of approved sellers that your company has already worked-out a contract terms with.
Only once in a great while, if you're ambitious, will you decide a product is massively over-priced, and start looking around for the cheapest, and if it's a SUBSTANTIAL price different, may recommend negotiating terms with that company as a new supplier.
It's quite different from consumer purchases, where the cheapest price, every time, is all you care about, no matter who you have to buy it from.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Sorry to hear they've gone out of business. I've bought 4 desktops and two laptops from them over the years and a couple of thousand bucks worth of assorted electronics. When I went to their site today, I was rather shocked to see they threw in the towel. I never realized they were having financial problems. I've found them to be a great place to pick up refurb. equipment at a decent price. Heck, I bought my first desktop from them (a HP 750C) back in the 90's. I've never seen deals on the purported "gorillas" that could compete with them. RIP Geeks.
Well, that might be how it works; but that doesn't mean it isn't broken. It seems like the cost of this opacity is born by the customer and/or the supplier that thinks it's a good idea when in reality they're turning away small companies that might grow into larger customer. I've had conversations like this:
Manager: Wow, that sounds like it might be a better solution. How much does it cost?
Me: It's "Call U$" pricing again...
Manager: Fuck it. Stay with Transparent Company, Inc.
Note, I've got no problem with larger prices and/or denial of orders in onesies and twosies. After all, that's the definition of "wholesale". I've got a real distaste for "Call U$". The other one that gets me is, "must be at an office" when the product is not dangerous or regulated, and is commonly shipped by UPS. It's like Keiretsu, and I don't see how you can defend it. Acknowledge that it exists, sure; but that's it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I don't see communism as inevitable. That assumption is based on the idea that there's only so much people will put up with. But if you lack the power and resources to do anything about it then you'll put up with anything. You don't have a choice. If 20 guys with riot gear and the training to use it want you to do what they say, you're going to do what they say. No amount of wishful thinking will change that.
Recycling can't really be done on the backend like that. It requires too many chemicals and produces too much waste. You can't get people to design products that either last or are easily recyclable because in a 'Free' market those products cost more. If you subsidize them you've got socialism again, and if you're going to do that I still think you might as well go whole hog and do it right...
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If they're just dropping the online retail to reserve themselves for middlemen, then what's the exact point of things?
They're not going out of business, just avoiding online retail.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Same here. Started buying from them around 1999-2000. In fact I bought a few hard drives from them just last week. I dunno where I'll be getting older technology HDDs at steal prices. I have a few devices that I'm maintaining that are incompatible with newer tech (4k sector) HDDs, which everyone makes these days... I need another source for older tech (512byte sector) HDDs.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
Wholesale prices are different for each customer based on volume. You can't just paste prices on the web dumbass.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
... Geekbert.
Wholesale prices are different for each customer based on volume. You can't just paste prices on the web dumbass.
Yes you can. You just have to use a table. Maybe you have to query the database. Some people even (gasp!) will pull from the database to let you know how many are in stock! Heresy, I know. Were you, pray tell, an Encyclopedia Britannica salesman at some point?
Of course if you've cut a sweetheart deal with a customer based on something *other* than order volume, that's your right; but that doesn't prevent you from posting baseline prices based on a simple algorithm.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Way back when, 1986-ish, San Diego & LA was the hub of places to purchase computing things from. I was a local business back in those days so purchased from a number of distributors/retail stores in SoCal, including that place in Oceanside that became geeks.com, The online part, which of course did not show up until after 1993, was very useful to me due to their carrying things that were hard to find elsewhere, their pricing and replacement policy was great, and I no longer lived in the area so could not "pop-in" for stuff.
I really am not sure which 1k gorilla geeks is alluding to, because there has been a lot of them over the years. For example, tigerdirect used to be a source I'd purchase from until they totally screwed a large order. Ecost.com was yet another but their web site became a bear to navigate. And Newegg actually started out in retail stores in SoCal as Egghead, though I use neweggbusiness.com now. Another place I use for hard to find items is CyberGuys.com, which has a distributor side. When I need consumables, I go to go4supply.com. I used to buy cpu's and memory chips (remember those?) from thechipmerchant.com, another SoCal store that is online.
And that really is why so many of you may never have heard of some of the other companies I mentioned, because they started out selling only to VARs, VADs, OEMs, etc, though geeks is an exception because of their store you could walk in to.
Agrisea Tsunami - Epyc Servers... https://agrisea.net/products
You must have been living under a rock for 15 years.
Their stuff was cheap crap, roughly half of everything I bought from them was broken or defective.
I stopped buying anything from them about 5 years back once I realized that spending twice as much on an item that actually works as advertised is waaay smarter than spending half on something that's busted or useless because it isn't what they claimed it was.
They can blame amazon all they want, but the last straw was that new vid card I ordered that arrived in a torn esd bag in an open box inside the shipping box, and their total lack of responsiveness when I informed them.
So no, I'm not shedding tears for geeks, their business model devolved over the years, and they simply couldn't compete. I suspect the real reasons they're closing have more to do with consumer saturation. I have a box in the closet of cheap busted geeks.com shit as a remider to be waaay more skeptical of online "deals". After all, how much cheap disposable busted electronic crap do YOU need ?
I've been a fan since they were Compgeeks, back-when. Geeks was a good place to do business. All other factors being equal, they were my first choice, because you could always get hold of a human with clues, and they were flexible about warranties -- a few days out, or an ongoing issue, and they'd still cover it. An item worth not much more than postage? don't bother returning it, we'll just refund you.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Another example of a monopoly (although no one seems to admit it) crushing the little guy....trust that when one online door closes a new one opens or does not open for a reason...thanks for the years of service....cheers~
Sounds similar to techforless.com, in Colorado Springs.
I've bought oddball stuff from them in the past.