Why Did CompUSA failed?
I have to admit that when I was going to buy electronics, non-Apple related electronics, my first option was CompUSA. Most of the time I found good prices and the quality was good as well. Then by early-2007 I heard that they where closing down a bunch of stores due to poor sales and a reestructuration using our bankruptcy laws was needed.
I’m no expert on business matter at this level, but I though that this was enough to save the business, and I was wrong. All around the news was announced that CompUSA which started business in 1984 was closing down their stores, selling their business to a liquidator which will take care of, well liquidating, all their assets to the highest bid. Then I started thinking what went wrong and here is my personal opinion on this matter.
Every time I got into one of the stores, I never felt that there was good organization. For some reason things looked old and there was nothing to buy there unless it was on sale. I bought hundreds of dollars worth of peripherals to fix my clients computers but never something that matter, like monitors or computers, event their TV’s where kind of expensive compared to other markets.
The store was never clean, and the employees… well let me tell you a story. One day I was getting some tools I needed to fix a computer and I overheard an employee saying to a customer that their USB-to-firewire cable was sold out. If this exists I apologize but I don’t think so. The Mac isles where always abandon and their endless tables of opened merchandise for sale was not a good looking factor.
Merchandise was not always on stock, the people that worked in the service department seem to know what they where talking about but it was almost impossible to talk to them about stuff in the store, they would always refer me to the sales guys in the store. The best offers where over the Internet and almost never they had enough of whatever they were selling.
I think this was inevitable for them and I feel sorry for their business failure, retail is not the best of the options when thinking about starting a new business but I’ll bet you that soon we will have a replacement for them. In the meantime I will have to settle for Best Buy, or my least favorite Circuit City. Do you have any stories to share about CompUSA?
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