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.

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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          


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