CompUSA
Closing.
While
the boys napped, I went out shopping at Toys'R'Us in Monrovia for birthday
presents for James. Shopping for James is a much tougher job than shopping for
William was, because we already have so many of William's toys around the house
that it's hard to find something new for James. Plus, there's already a ton of
clutter around the house to which I'm never really happy to add. Plus, I don't
want to get James something that William might end up monopolizing. Plus, James
seems mainly interested in the things that William is interested in,
anyway.
Anyway, after getting James a
small handful of presents that I felt pretty sure he'd like but which William
will likely leave to him, I went across the street to the CompUSA, intending to
pick up a couple of short Firewire cables. I was surprised to find that that
CompUSA is closing its doors and selling its inventory at big discounts. I
almost never shop there any more, and I had heard from Hsuan that CompUSA and
Circuit City were getting killed by Best Buy. It's not really surprising, given
the market, but I was somewhat taken aback by the closeout sale. I was
surprised to realize that CompUSA has fallen so far out of my shopping range
that I didn't realize at a gut-level that they were in such bad shape until I
was faced with this closeout.
My
feelings about this are a little ambivalent, because CompUSA played a
significant part of my shopping life in the 1990's. Back in the 1980's,
shopping for computers, hardware, software, and accessories involved visiting
small specialty stores. Probably the first thing approaching a chain store that
I encountered was Computerware, in the early 1980's -- a store for early geeks,
staffed by early geeks. I was too young, then, to drive there myself. When I
went to Stanford, there was a Macintosh retailer south of Stanford whose name
I've completely forgotten, somewhere on El Camino Real. However, if I really
wanted Mac hardware, I mostly stuck with the campus computer store, but it
wasn't conducive to hanging out and browsing. I even briefly had some exposure
to Fry's, but it was out of my usual travel routes. When I went to Caltech, it
was largely the same thing: There was a small Mac specialty store nearby in
addition to the campus computer store, but neither place was a place to browse
or hang out.
Then, sometime in the
early 1990's, a CompUSA opened in the City of Industry. This was a seriously
long drive away from Pasadena, but it was the first large retail space where I
could hang out and poke at the hardware, browse the software, and so on. It was
a relatively small store compared to the CompUSA Superstores that were to come.
It was my first taste of computer retailing heaven that had a chance of
spreading, and spread it did. Eventually, the CompUSA Superstore opened in
nearby Monrovia, and Fry's Electronics superstores sprung up all around southern
California, including Burbank, which was closer than the City of
Industry.
By the time I moved to
Chicago, CompUSA superstores were
everywhere.
Eventually, particularly
after our return to Southern California, with even office supply superstores
carrying miscellaneous computer hardware, software, and accessories, my need to
visit CompUSA diminished greatly. There were more Fry's stores around, too.
CompUSA had grown tremendously less Mac-friendly and tremendously pro-Windows,
which eliminated CompUSA as a destination for anything but cables and storage
media. Their prices were always MSRP, while other stores offered much better
deals. Their sales staff, while usually pleasant at the cash registers, were
ill-informed and unhelpful (not unfriendly, just unhelpful), with a few special
and very rare exceptions. They briefly flirted with the Apple
store-within-a-store concept, but with the advent of actual Apple Store retail
locations, it was too late. Apple Stores really are Mac-heavenly shopping
experiences -- beautiful environments, an abundance of Mac products, and
friendly, helpful, and extremely knowledgeable
staff.
There's simply no reason for
CompUSA to be a target shopping destination for me, and there hasn't been such a
reason for a very long time.
So, today,
I browsed around, looking for something I could buy at a reasonable discount. I
ended up buying RAM for my PowerMac as well as a stack of DVD-R's and an SD
card, but I doubt the discounted prices were any better than I could have gotten
online at, say, Amazon.com. I tried searching for inkjet printer cartridges for
my printer, but the stock was already depleted. The hardware offerings didn't
seem to be attractive at all.
All in
all, a somewhat sad experience.
Oh, and
they didn't have any Firewire cables for me,
either.
-----
While
grabbing his sippy cup for some milk, James fell out of his chair at dinner this
evening, onto his face on the floor. He had a bit of a bloody nose.
Scary.
Posted: Sat
- April 14, 2007 at 10:33 PM