A while ago, I was saddened to hear of the CompUSA store in my family’s area closing, but was not surprised. I knew that that particular store never really netted any amazing sales, nor drew many customers, but what can you expect from a South Orange County suburb electronics store? You can hardly expect it to be any busier than the Radio Shack or Gamestop in the same shopping center–and it wasn’t. But I thought nothing of it, after all, companies often shut their doors on failed retail expansions to keep the company itself from hurting (The Greater Good syndrome). Then something strange happened: the CompUSA here announced a closing clearance sale!

I was extremely disheartened; I mean, this brand I had grown up with, a legend in the hall of retail computer fame, was going to be decimated and obliterated in the wake of Prada, Coach, Nordstrom’s and Luis Vuitton’s repetitive-yet-chic products. I remember when CompUSA was big, a great deal, and your neighbourhood superstore: back when Fry’s wasn’t huge, and when it used to be Incredible Universe (I remember playing with the Nintendo 64 display they had set up for launch day! That was exciting!), when Best Buy was just an idea, and when Radio Shack actually sold more components than cell phones. I did a small, very small, amount of digging and found out that the beloved behemoth was not dying, but worse: it was bought.

According to this, some company no one has ever heard of (the really rich ones are under the public radar) essentially bought out CompUSA, and they are beginning to “convert assets”, which is a fancy way of saying “getting rid of CompUSA’s crap”. Loaded with the usual “better service”, “enhanced opportunities”, “loyal customers” and other fancy-schmancy keywords, the press release reads like a thinly-veiled “Haha suckers! We got the company and the customers, and you’re feeding our wallets now!” slightly mocking the stagnant retail operations that CompUSA had become. It plans on “using” the “CompUSA brand name,” another way of saying, “We aren’t stupid enough to try and change what’s there entirely, because we want to fool people into thinking it really is CompUSA.” It’s a really nifty trick that many companies have used, leaving the illusion there are more companies than there really are, or that a customer’s old favourite really hasn’t gone away, just…shifted, slightly. A few million dollars slightly.

*Sigh* </emote>. That was a little ranty, but what do you expect from a Tech blog from a programmer who does nothing other than read thousands of lines of code a day? You should be happy I can still form sentences!

日本語が読めば、こちらをクリックして、もっと詳しく読んだり写真を見たり出来ます。

Even if you can’t read Japanese, click on it anyways for a few photos. :p

echo ‘Peace out, ppl.’;

end();

}