CompUSA
Aisle after aisle of boxed software, a wall of printer cables, and a cart carrying your family's first PC. CompUSA — the self-billed Computer Superstore — was where America went to buy the future, one weekend errand at a time.
CompUSA's roots trace to 1984, when Errol Jacobson and Mike Henochowicz founded Soft Warehouse in Addison, Texas. The first superstore opened in Addison in 1986, national expansion began in 1988 with a first megastore in Atlanta, and in 1991 the company renamed itself CompUSA and listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Through the 1990s it grew into a nationwide big-box chain — at its peak at least 229 locations — and added on-site technical services in 1993. For families buying a first home PC, the ritual was the point: the cart, the software aisle, the bewildering wall of peripherals, the box in the trunk that felt like the future.
The decline was the standard big-box story with a twist of self-inflicted wounds: competition from other brick-and-mortar retailers, corporate management out of touch with the market, and a failure to move convincingly online. In 2006 CompUSA began closing "low performing" stores; in February 2007 it announced the closing and liquidation of 126 of them, a round completed that May.
On December 7, 2007, the company was sold to Specialty Equity, an affiliate of Gordon Brothers Group, and the remaining 103 stores were closed out. Systemax bought the CompUSA name and as many as 16 stores in January 2008, folding them into TigerDirect in 2012 — the quiet end of the store where a generation's first computers came from.
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