I don't know if you've heard or not, but CompUSA is going out of business. Well, we have one here, and I decided to drop by and see if there was anything worth picking up off of the sale prices. Thing is, I used to shop at CompUSA all the time, till I found pricewatch.com, then newegg.com through Pricewatch. CompUSA didn't just have prices 10% to 20% higher than online sales, I found a 20gig drive at CompUSA that was over $70 more than the same exact model offline. Same with all the hardware, CompUSA was easily 40% to 50% higher than online stores.
So, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that CompUSA's sale prices... were still above that which I would pay through any pricewatch.com vendor, as well as Newegg.com
So, instead of picking up any hardware, I decided to harass the remaining sales staff. I asked one of the employees off the record if he could comment at all on the impact of Vista sales on the end of CompUSA's business, expecting no comment. Afterall, most such retail chains don't want local employees speaking out for the company.
That... isn't what I got. With a glaring look he responded I'd be better off asking about the returns. Returns? Well, the employee asked me to follow him to the back, and he pulled out a cardboard box opening it up to reveal it was packed full of copies of Vista.
Returns.
Every single one of them he said was returned from consumers... and that they (CompUSA) couldn't ship them back. As he heard, Microsoft wasn't giving credit back for unsold or returned copies... and didn't want the returned figures made public... He wouldn't say that every single one of them exchanged for a copy of Xp, he didn't know if that was true. So, I asked how many boxes did they have. Same glare, followed with a "You do not want to know" type statement.
***
All in all an interesting trip then... I do need to stress that this is third hand information, that the employee was not a manager, and that he declined to allow his name to be published.
Even so, the implications are staggering. CompUSA isn't exactly a tiny retail chain. Underperforming, yes. Tiny... not really. If what the employee stated was true, Microsoft isn't counting or claiming returned numbers on sold versions of Vista, which cuts far into the current estimated number that I have personally placed somewhere on the wrong-side of 30 million.
This isn't exactly a new practice, it's one Sony was confirmed to be using back when the N64 was catching up to weekly Playstation sales in order to make the Playstation sell better. It's one that a couple other software vendors have neglected to talk about before, and why many retail and online stores have a strict Open-Software policy in place. The idea is that nobody is ever supposed to get a handle on exactly how badly a piece of software does on returns.
It also brings to question how many returns that CompUSA refused to honor... and why so many were honored at the store to begin with... questions I did not receive any answers for.
2 comments:
wow Carlos Slim owns compUSA¡¡
i heard that he will sell it because he lost money¡
im not surprise you found high prices in compUSA. Its the same thing fucking Slim is doing in Telmex -phone company- monopoly in Mexico.
But when Slim find competitors in true markets like USA he shows his true face: stupid asshole.
Microsoft and prodigy -internet service from Telmex- are kind of partners in Mexico.
Glad to hear that part of the lost money came from Vista jo jo jo jo.
I am (was) a manager for CompUSA, it wasn't Vista that killed us.
First, we bought Computer City, closed most of the stores and then grew too fast with the remaining ones. We didn't use what they had better than us; we just turned them in to us. In the long run we would have been better off not buying them.
Second, we bought Good Guys and did the same thing. GG really put the nail in the coffin though, it brought us to our knees as we gained nothing from that purchase except for the ability to carry Sony brand TVs.
Third, our employee training was good but not good enough; it didn't ask random questions and was online. Basically one employee would take it, write the answers down and everyone would use the cheat sheet. So basically people didn't learn anything.
Fourth, the reason for this was not stopped was the payroll cuts. We lost half our payroll and were expected to turn out the same numbers. Not going to make people train since doing so meant even less hours helping customers... catch 22. Sales went down so lets cut payroll, it went down again so lets cut it more, we were unable to help customers that wanted it and they never came back.
Fifth, Customers abused us. Hate to say it but a good portion of our customers would try to return notebooks because they just didn't need it after that work or school project was done. You stick to the restock/return policies and corporate would bend like a tree in a hurricane except for the last year when they saw how abusive the customers were. *Not all customers, maybe 10% but that is enough to kill you when the margins were so low.
Sixth, the Internet killed us and we didn't change to fight it. B&M can't usually touch mail order prices; there are so many more expenses to deal with. But if we had trained team members and carried hot new items and offered OEM versions of hardware we would have been able to fight it a bit better.
Seventh, we forgot what were where and tried to be a mini Best Buy. We were a computer store; we should have become a computer parts store with more business machines and fewer retail desktop and laptops. Instead we carried videogames that never sold because we couldn’t buy enough to get better prices, same for the DVDs by the way. We carried Televisions, DVD player, Satellite Radios, Stereo systems, cell phones and home security systems.
Instead, we should have ink refill stations, itune download stations, a bigger Apple section (not a fan, but respect the sales it did), displays where you can walk down an aisle and get everything you needed to build your own computer. We should have totally geeked out on computer parts, cameras and cutting edge gaming systems.
When we started computers were scary, new, not in every house. Now Wal-Mart sells them, Grandparents use them and kids can rock out on them before they even start school. Our original customers were not the average person, they were a step ahead of everyone and in the end we forgot them and looked toward the average guy to come to us.
Lastly we died because while everyone else was expanding, we shrank. You could drive by 3 Best Buys before getting to CompUSA, why would you? And you didn’t.
We wanted to help every customer but couldn’t, with the payroll cut backs it was hard. Also as people left we would hire cheaper people just so we could get more hours out of them; they were not always the best. Warranties, I believe in them; I’ve seen laptops that cost more to fix than replace get replaced with much better units. We didn’t charge enough for our tech services, we were very cheap and usually did a decent job; most issues were caused by replacement parts being defective or us having to send the units out and them not getting repaired correctly; when we did it in-house it was done right. Customers changed, originally customer wanted great service and were willing to pay for it, now they want even better service but want rock bottom prices, and you can’t have both.
We died for many reason, not just one.
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