CompUSA is selling a broken Sony DVD player for $179.98—that’s 40% off the sticker price! The Wife over at Bastion of Mediocrity noticed that the sticker also reads: “Defective,” “Does Not Work,” “As Is.”

She writes:

In any case, after wandering through two of the four remaining aisles, we came across a Sony DVD player that looked pretty solid and was discounted at 40% off. That’s when I read the hand-printed words on the sales tag.

“Defective”

and

“DOES NOT WORK”

There was also an ‘As Is’ tag on the item, just in case you didn’t read the hand writing on the big yellow sales tag and decided to try and return it later.

Wow, $179.98 for a brick sounds like a deal to me! Thanks CompUSA! This is why you’re in liquidation now!

They also had a heavily-used tape dispenser for $2.00 and used, broken bar stool for $10. WOW! WHAT A GREAT DEAL!

The thing is, The Husband worked for Circuit City, so we price checked some of the other items in the store to see how good the discounts were. Many of them were selling at 40% off some inflated price so that the final discounted price was only $20 or so below the price of Circuit City or Best Buy right next door. I looked at a .Mac subscription pack, and it was selling for $10 below the price at the Apple store, though this was 40% off the highly inflated price. The pack was for a basic membership ($99.99 at apple.com) and was originally $179.99 (price of a family membership) and reduced to $89.99.

The Wife concludes: “Even in liquidation, CompUSA is still full of fail.” This is wrong. CompUSA is an innovation leader. In fact, we’ve been inspired to hold our own liquidation/garage sale. We have a rusty rake missing three tines. $80, no returns. Form an orderly line in the comments.

CompUSA: 40% off a defective DVD player that DOES NOT WORK [Bastion of Mediocrity]