CompUSA is closing [1] the last of its retail stores after the end of the year. (There might be some bargains at the West Knoxville store if you hurry.)

This is a little sad in an "end of an era" sort of way, but CompUSA has been increasingly irrelevant with stores like Staples and Office Depot and Circuit City and Best Buy carrying most of the same inventory, or at least top sellers in the same product categories.

And those stores sell other, higher margin items to help pay the rent while CompUSA stuck to selling commodity products that people are increasingly buying over the internet. At least that's my analysis.

I think the last thing I bought at CompUSA was an external eSATA hard drive that nobody else carried locally. All the local Best Buy and Circuit City stores have them in stock now. I think every router and cable and add-on network card or USB device in my home/office came from either Staples or Office Depot. The last few memory and hard drive upgrades have come from those places, too. I buy software mostly over the internet, and the only other thing I've had to order because I couldn't find it locally was a SCSI hard drive for a server.

The last time I checked, CompUSA had a better selection of printers and supplies like inks and papers than the other stores, but that's about the only advantage I could see. They had a lot of accessories like video adapters and DVD drives, but they also had a lot of cheap junk while the other stores only seem to carry the top selling, most widely known brands and maybe one discount junk version.

So I guess I won't really miss CompUSA, but it's sad to see them go.

(By way of JAH [2])