CompUSA: RIP

Posted by: Arik Hesseldahl on December 7, 2007

The day after I saw the gorgeous inside of the new Apple store in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District comes word that CompUSA is shutting its doors for good after the holidays. The company has been acquired by Gordon Brothers Group, which will initiate an “orderly wind-down” of its 103 retail stores beginning today. No one should really be surprised. Between Dell’s success with its direct sales model, then the success of Best Buy, Circuit City, and the Apple Store, the computer retailing business just hasn’t been an easy play for anyone. CompUSA was struggling when it was acquired by the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim in 2000.

I’ve been quietly rooting for it to turn around. I went to high school and college with its current CEO Roman Ross. The last time I saw him was in the summer of 1996 when we shot pool and drank beer with a mutual friend at a bar in Corvallis, OR. That summer he had just finished his first or second year of law school at the University of Oregon, and he had taken a legal internship with the tobacco company Philip Morris, now known as Altria. I remember being a little annoyed when he insisted that we drink only Miller Beer, which was in those days still owned by Phillip Morris. He went on to a career with the Mexican unit of Philip Morris, though in exactly what capacity I don’t know.

He was, I think, a rather curious choice as CEO to run a major computer and electronics retailer. I’m not sure how a career in the tobacco industry sets you up for retailing consumer electronics. And during those years when we ran in the same circles, I never once saw him touch a computer. Since he got the job I’d asked a few times for an opportunity to sit down over dinner and talk it over. He never got back to me. That led me to believe that his main role in taking this job was make the tough decisions associated with a make-or-break strategy to turn the operation around or shut it down, with an understanding that “shut it down” was considered the most likely alternative going in.

The company shut down 126 stores earlier this year leaving only 100, and its not all that hard to guess why: Anecdotally I don’t know anyone who’s set foot inside a CompUSA in the last two years. Well, there was one: A friend of mine in New York took his ThinkPad in to the store in Manhattan for some kind of repair earlier this year, and who told me later that it came back in worse shape than before. He soon ended up in BestBuy, and was soon the happy owner of an HP notebook. (He wouldn’t go for a Mac.)

In another era, about 1997 or so, I spent a lot of time in CompUSA. Those where the days when Apple operated its “store within a store” concept at CompUSA. That made it, at least in some markets, the place to go for Mac and Mac-related purchases. Once that ended, my reasons for going inside were gone. So it goes. So long CompUSA.