Sales Help

As you may or may not have heard, a whole mess of CompUSA stores are closing, necessitating a massive clearance sale effort. We happened to be near one of the soon-to-be-closed stores today and stopped in to see what had not been picked over yet. As we expected, the good stuff was gone--probably snapped up on the first day by people flipping the merchandise on eBay.

When a store has the staple yankers and the timecard holders for sale, the 17 PA announcements of "Everything is on sale. We're clearing the store out to the walls" are pretty much superfluous. When there are price tags on the fixtures, for the fixtures, we get the message. We spent about an hour picking through what was left, which was not that much. After listening to a couple dozen reminders that the company was "Clearing the store to the walls," we finally saw something we wanted: a HD TiVo with DirecTV. We looked for a sales clerk--harder than you might think, since folks who are on the verge of unemployment are not overly eager to serve you--only to find out that it was not for sale.

Everything was for sale. Except the TiVo.

They were selling the shelves. Not the Tivo. Selling the discolored little plastic tags that hold the prices to the shelves. Not the TiVo. With a high enough credit limit, we probably could have bought a couple of the employees. Bit not the TiVo.