We’ve got the CompUSA internal discount list for their going out of business liquidation sale. The discounts are mainly 10% and 20%, with some 5% and 30% in there. Audio hardware, mounting brackets and the like, is 30% off. Just because they’re imploding doesn’t mean they don’t have some pride, as least for now. They’re entitled “opening discounts,” so perhaps will keep dropping week by week until all the stock is gone. Looks like for now they’re using the same close-out strategy as when they closed down most of their stores before: offer crappy deals and advertise the heck out of it.
(Photo: quentinr)
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When do these discounts start??
@axiomatic: CompUSA wasn’t an independent company. The ex-owner, billionaire Carlos Slim, owns many other businesses too. He lost anywhere from hundreds of millions to a few billion. However, he’s got $40 billion+ to fall back on.
I’ll spend more money on gas getting to the store then the discount they are offering. Good Riddance CompUSA.
Even in epic fail, CompUSA still fails epically, or something.
Utter and epic fail, indeed. CompUSA, you won’t be missed.
All going out of business sells are terrible ripoffs. The merchandise is priced for less elsewhere, plus you can’t return something to them if it’s defective. Its a lose lose situation for the consumer.
This list is accurate. I was just over at CompUSA and saw the exact same discounts. BTW most of the TVs were 10% off.
@prateeko:
“Only *remotely* worthwhile thing there is 20% off Wireless Telephones (Cell phones If I understand correctly).”
LOL, you are really showing your age here. I’ve not yet broken age 25 and I still know that a wireless telephone is a telephone attached to a land line (a strange concept built on physical wires stretched thousands of miles along wooden poles or trenches in the ground…who knew such a thing existed on Earth?) but with a cordless receiver so you can walk around your house chatting with your friend on $0.08/minute long distance service.
“If it’s not 50% off, it’s not on sale.” – The Nanny
When our local CompUSA store (Modesto, California) liquidated earlier this year, I was lucky enough to pick up a 42-inch HP PL4260N plasma HDTV set for around $800, less than half what it costs now at Amazon.com.
It’s all a matter of timing and luck. The first weeks of clearance discounts are nothing to write home about — I popped in several times during that span and never saw anything discounted deeply enough to warrant a purchase.
As I wandered the store in the closing weeks, though, my eye caught a flat panel TV hanging on the back wall. It was turned off and was missing a speaker. Somehow I had walked past it numerous times in the preceding weeks and had *never* noticed it.
I stopped a passing sales associate and asked whether it worked. He went back and found a laptop and a VGA cable, hooked it up, and powered up the TV. It looked *great*! The sales associate warned me that the right speaker was missing, but that I could possibly order another one from HP. As I pondered this course of action, I spotted the tall thin speaker lying flat on the shelving unit below the display, tucked under some signage and other detritus.
Although the associate tried to convince me of the superiority of LCD-based HDTVs over plasma, and of HP’s mediocrity in the HDTV market, I bought it immediately and have had nary a bit of trouble with it so far.
So be patient with these clearance sales and try to go back multiple times. Look *carefully* for hidden sales gems, and don’t be shy about getting help from the sales associates.
@BloggyMcBlogBlog: $35 off an Xbox 360 Premium isn’t a good deal?
Yeah, that CompUSA sure sucks hard with these prices.
..oh, wait, no, this isn’t CompUSA selling this stuff, it’s liquidators.
And I’ll let you in on another secret..they’re trying to make as much as they can. So the opening deals? Of course they suck. If they can lure people in with these “discounted” prices, they’re gonna go for it. As many sales as they can make when things aren’t actually on sale is their goal here. The discounts will get big as time goes on..but by then it’s a sort of lottery. The longer the wait, the better the discount, but the higher likelihood of what you want being gone. That’s how it worked when Mervyns and CompUSA closed shop up in the NW
Deals suck
“When the CompUSA when out of business here, I visited the store week after week thinking eventually there would be something there to buy. They weren’t very smooth about hiding the fact that they marked everything up before they took the discount. There were price stickers on top of price stickers, each one getting progressively more epensive as the weeks went on. When they sold out of an item, they would then put up advertisements with really low prices….because they didn’t have any more.”
I worked at a closing one, Unless the guy running the closing was shaddy as shit they don’t do that.
you people have to understand, The closing stores are no longer run by CompUSA, is all the liquidation company. The discount lists are taken from an inventory database of every item the store has ever sold by SKU category. The merchandise lists have to be as complete as possible for legal reasons. The liquidation managers make a KILLING. they get over 6 figures, if you see them driving a crappy car its only cause if they drove their nice once the employees would mess them up (believe me we plotted how many ways we could screw up their car. But we knew he would press charges and we would be facing jail time)
But regardless CompUSA is a shitty company and was run by absolute morons. My manager was an old car salesman to give you an idea of what kind of mentality they wanted running those stores… not only that he was fired then rehired.
sorry to double post. but the reason they sell this way is because people buy it…. they have a 3 month deadline. the managers get bonuses if they sell it sooner then that. they also get bonuses for selling things before price drops. our manager got over $30,000 in bonus cash.
Hurry up and die CompUSA. I’m ready for Microcenter to come and take your place. Hell, I’d probably even take a Fry’s.
Good luck with that..our CompUSA has been gone for ages and the building’s still empty
Major retailers NEVER learn:
When you overcharge and have clueless staff, eventually the store will die. How come the customers can figure this out and not management? I remember another pc store called Computer City which died a similar fate. It’s been my experience in Ohio where both stores allowed the stereos to crank foul & obscene music as store personnel smoked and took their breaks in front of the entrance. Good Riddence! I wish they would die sooner!
OK, I’m thinking about 99% of you guys leaving comments about this have no idea as to what’s going on with these liquidation sales. As an ex-compusa employee, I had the pleasure back in February to hear that my store was closing down during the first round of layoffs. So…with a little bit of insider knowledge as to how CompUSA and Gordon Brothers (liquidation company) work…hopefully I’ll be able to clear a few things up for ya.
1. Gordon Bros. now owns CompUSA. This means that CompUSA is not the ones that are controlling the discounts on the products. Gordon Bros is making an attempt to make as much money off their purchase of CompUSA by keeping the discounts minimal to start things off, in hopes to make as much profit as possible.
2. They dont raise the prices up and discount them down to make it look like their on sale. With me 10 years of experience at CompUSA, not once did I ever see this happen….ever.
3. All sales are final. This means even if you bought the wrong ink cartridge and wanted to exchange it, they wont let you. It’s not because they dont want to, its because the cashiers have bascially been threatened with their jobs by the Gordon Bros rep to not let this happen. Take the cartridge to another electronics retails and I’m sure they’ll be happy to get you taken care of, along with acquiring a new happy customer.
4. The department list is accurate in the fact that these are all the departments and sub-departments that show up in their database. True, Apple hasn’t made printers forever, doesn’t mean that they were once carried at CompUSA. It’s showing up on the list because there might be one store somewhere that has an old beat up discontinued printer sitting in a box somewhere still showing in inventory.
5. Markups…network cables, USB cables, VGA cables…all that stuff. Bascically anything with the word Belkin on it has disgusting amounts of margin in it and this really is one of the few, if not only places CompUSA had made any profit. Sure their cost is less then $2 for a 6′ USB cable…but when you’re selling desktops and laptops, on sale, for less then what CompUSA bought them from the manufacturers for, you’ve got to make that money up somewhere. Besides…have you ever gone to CC, BB or even Microcenter to see how their cabling is priced compared to online? Think about it.
5. Don’t take your frustrations out on the employees. If anything, their even more screwed then you are. Here you are having to pay for something that’s a few dollars above cost. But they just got news that their going to be out a job and there’s nothing they can do about it. It’s an amazing opportunity for me, as a manager for a competitor for CompUSA to go snatch up some great employees who happen to work for a not so great company.
6. Quit whining, as I stated earlier, this is the first round of discounts. With this process taking at least 8-12 weeks, you can be sure that in the next week at most, you’ll see the discounts starting to get better and better. If you dont want to pay full price for something, give it a few weeks, either you’ll get it for a better price, or find that someone else was happy with saving 30% off a wall mount kit versus 50% off.
Does the closing date of the store depend on how long it takes to sell everything? Or is it a certain time frame and what is left is disposed of other ways. I went to the Lansing MI store and they were just putting up the sign outside and looked like they were still stocked pretty good.