Word on the street is that CompUSA is closing over half their stores, starting tomorrow. I went over to their locations page: if it’s accurate, the only store staying in WA is the one in Spokane.
The only surprising thing to me is that it took this long. Most computer stores have a half life of five years… it’s pricy to keep all that stock in stock. It’s what killed CompuAdd. And Gateway. And whoever else was in the field, it seems. For CompUSA to hang on for over 15 years?
Impressive, in a way but even so: rest in pieces.
Actually CompUSA is almost 20 years old. They opened under a different name, and was primarily software — their first store was a few miles from my house.
I’ll probably remember the first name later in the day.
But it is amazing they have survived.
Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompUSA) says “1984 – Founded as Soft Warehouse in Addison, Texas, selling direct to business customers.”
True true, but they really pushed out as a national company in the early 90’s, which is where I came up with 15 years… kinda like Fry’s. They’ve been around for decades but they really “started” when they expanded into a bunch of other states.
The question now does Fry’s go coast to coast like CompUSA did 15 years ago? Or do we leave the computer business to Circuit City, Costco, Best Buy and Radio Shack? And mail/online ordering, of course!
I had my first visit to both CompUSA and Frys in Sunnyvale, CA back in the early 1990s. Frys was an incredible place – and across the street was a place called Weird Stuff warehouse. They had – like the name suggests – weird stuff. How weird? How about a DEC VAX minicomputer? It was like a computer museum in there. Here are some pictures:
http://www.weirdstuff.com/sunnyvale/html/index.htm
By the way, Frys bought Cyberian Outpost, a struggling consumer computer online store based in the rural town of Kent, CT. They used to be known as Outpost.com – quite famous for their weird commercials shooting gerbils from a cannon.
Outpost.com was renamed Frys.com. So much for the gerbils.
CompUSA was started by the founder of Home Depot after he took that company and Target national. He died 2 years ago. Nathan Morton (1948-2005)
Fry’s Electronics is the worst place to purchase and or have your computer serviced. After 89 days of waiting to have my laptop repaired by HP after Frys determined they could not fix it but would extract all my info from my hard drive for $150.00 they gave me someone else’s extracted data which contains alot of porn, alot of personal and professional information. They have offered no assistance in retrieving my data which contains copies of downloaded credit bureaus, bank statements all types of personal information. This company and it’s employees lack the professionalism required to run a McDonalds, they should not be trusted with sensitive information.