CompUSA: 40% off a defective DVD player that DOES NOT WORK

My husband and I went into CompUSA today to look for some good deals take in the wreckage of the once mighty CompUSA and laugh at the store that pissed me off with not only high prices but also it’s horrible business practices such as forcing employees to work on Thanksgiving Day to get a jump on the competition’s Black Friday sales. Ick! Going in there while it was open always left me feeling a little dirty inside, and seeing the carcas of that model of everything wrong with retail in America today made me feel just scummy, and yet simultaneously wonderful.

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.

Then, there was the little Zune nano for $139.99 — also only reduced by $10, and it was a display item. It admittedly was that puke green color, but still, I could walk to two other places right down the street and buy it for ten dollars more, brand new, free of the greasy hands of teenagers? I’ll pay for that convenience!

My husband later said to me, “I thought the purpose of a liquidation sale was to get rid of merchandise, not to inflate the prices to what they were before the store went out of business.”

And here I thought the purpose of liquidation was to see who could get the most copper wiring out of the building before getting caught. They *were* selling everything that wasn’t nailed down, of course, including the above-mentioned chair and tape dispenser, the security cases for video games (which, at $37.99 each are worth more than the DVDs they hold. Maybe that’s why thieves steal video games!), and old plastic trashcans (the kind you can buy at Staples — right across the street — for five bucks) for ten dollars. Used DVDs were also in the $10 category too, which was sad, as you can get them new at Target for the same price.

Of course, there were no sales people to be had, and we actively talked one gentleman out of buying an Apple TV (which he believed worked like a TiVo and would allow him to burn his favorite shows to DVD as well. Sorry, hun!)

Even in liquidation, CompUSA is still full of fail.

(Full of fail, except for the cut out drawing of Christopher Walken’s head above the registers, his eyes glowing red, hovering over the “no refunds” sign. Walken is always FTW.)