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Systemax adds the CompUSA brand to its empire

The downfall of CompUSA has been chronicled on DailyTech over the course of the past year. The news surrounding the demise of the company came to a head in early December when it was announced that CompUSA would close all of its stores during the opening months of 2008.

Earlier this month, DailyTech reported that TigerDirect was looking to purchase a few of the closing CompUSA stores in the Miami, Florida area. More evidence to support this claim came in the form of Wikipedia entries that had been created by none other than employees from CompUSA's U.S. headquarters in Addison, Texas.

That information is now official and Systemax, the parent company of TigerDirect, is indeed acquiring a number of CompUSA retail locations. Systemax will acquire 16 CompUSA locations, CompUSA's trademarks and will also acquire the CompUSA.com website and operate it alongside TigerDirect.com.

"Millions of loyal customers will come to the Systemax and TigerDirect family of businesses through this acquisition," said TigerDirect CEO Fiorentino said. "We anticipate hiring many experienced CompUSA employees, preserving hundreds of store management and sales positions and making us stronger and better in the process."

In addition, all existing TigerDirect stores will now be called CompUSA. "We have a terrific opportunity to continue the great CompUSA brand and establish a new heritage that will extend for generations to come," Fiorentino added.

The acquisition of CompUSA's trademarks and entities will cost Systemax an estimated $30 million USD.

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Extended Warranty Sales Pitch
By roadrun777 on 1/7/2008 11:34:44 PM , Rating: 2
I hope they do well. It would be nice to see a retail outlet for system builders that have all the things you normally have to purchases online. My only problem with the old CompUSA were the aggressive policies they used to try to sell extended warranties. They would take money away from employees if they didn't sell enough extended warranties, and that painted a very unpleasant picture of the management.
I just hope they have competitive prices that compare to online stores. I haven't bought personal computer items from a retail store in many years. This has mainly been because of the excellent high resolution images provided for online shoppers, and the excellent way the reviews of each product are handled. It always seemed to me, that the major retail stores always censored, or outright denied customers, the ability to share their experiences of purchased products with other potential customers even if those reviews where negative.




RE: Extended Warranty Sales Pitch
By mmntech on 1/8/2008 9:07:51 AM , Rating: 2
It depends what you're buying. There are a few TigerDirect stores in Ontario. There's one in Toronto, Mississauga, and Burlington. I think there's one in Markham as well. I find their everyday parts to be cheap. Stuff like keyboards, printers, power supplies, coolers, etc. Stuff like graphics cards, hard drives, motherboards, and memory are overpriced. I buy that stuff from NCIX since I don't have to pay PST on it.

Yep, they do do the extended warranty stunt too at the stores. They tried to sell me one on a $40 wireless keyboard and mouse combo I bought from them last time I was there. I've yet to encounter an electronics store that doesn't do this though I've never heard of them docking their employees' pay for not selling enough of them. That sounds illegal.


"What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders." -- Michael Dell, after being asked what to do with Apple Computer in 1997

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