Or, why they are closing 126 of 229 stores or over half of their retail chain.

I recently had a dealing with CompUSA that left me with never wanting to buy anything from them again.  Now, I should say, that I hardly ever bought from them before, but I would often go in and look around because, well, I like perusing such stores to poke at stuff. ;)

Right before our trip to Maui, we had a need for a small, point-and-shoot camera.  I've already talked about the Canon SD900.  Well, we first got it at CompUSA the night before our flight and about an hour before the store closed.  I though the price was decent and within the "good enough" category.  However, when I got back I found that it wasn't even close.  CompUSA had the camera for $425 ($25 off) and the 2GB SD cards for $40 with $10 rebate, which I thought was a good price.  I didn't do any research though as we didn't have any time to.  Well, I found that Amazon had the camera for $350 and the same sized SD cards for $12. 

Looking at the receipt I found that not only was the return policy only 14 days for the camera (21 for the cards) instead of the more usual 30 days at places such as Fry's, I found that they also charged a 15% restocking fee!  I've never had to pay a restocking fee before.  It seems silly, to me. 

However, as it turns out, after subtracting the restocking fee for the camera, returning both cards, and taking the $65 loss, I was still able to go to Amazon and buy the camera and cards for $100 less than I got back.  Sure, if I'd done that in the first place I would have saved $165 total, but I didn't. 

When returning, they weren't even willing to deal with me.  They just accepted the fact that their prices were actually so horrible that the restocking fee wasn't even an issue to me.  I'm sure that to restock the item, they'd actually end up having to pay more than the $65 for the labor and overhead plus the reduction in the cost of the open box item.  Had they made a counter offer that was close enough, I might have just gone for it.  Although, by then, I really didn't want them to keep much of my money.

So, that's why I think they are having to close down most of their stores and will ultimately either fail or get acquired by a competing and better chain.  They have terrible prices and their return policy is even worse.

Posted by Shane on March 2, 2007 8:37 AM | Permalink