While I don’t delight in area businesses closing stores and underpaid employees losing their jobs, I don’t care for shoddy management and corporations that insulate themselves from customers. What comes around should go around for these companies. And usually does.

Therefore it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that CompUSA is closing half of its stores and all of them in our area (greater Puget Sound, Washington State). The complete list of going out of business locations is available here straight from CompUSA.

As the Mac OS X Leopard launch looms nearer, I’m reminded of my own customer noservice horror story involving IncompetenceUSA. I took some heat from diehard macheads and suspicious CompUSA shills because I didn’t know how the traditional Mac launch schedule works (and not using the internet to backup what I was told) but the most remarkable thing about my experience is that the district manager in our area was “too busy” to talk to unimportant customers like me.

Wonder if Mr. Important District Manager will have time to talk to customers in his next position with another company? Or maybe he is keeping his job why all the other unimportant people employed beneath him lose their jobs? Who knows, corporate karma works in strange ways. I wouldn’t be surprised if he received a promotion and a raise!

That negative experience didn’t completely ruin CompUSA in my eyes. I’m happy to wait for the deep discounting as they unload all their inventory. I didn’t blame the store as much as the upper management/corporate for my bad experience anyway. The store employees were courteous. We were shopping there last night — completely uneventfully — in fact.

NYT columnist David Pogue thinks the reasons CompUSA is having trouble is due to uncompetitive prices (compared to the internet) and unknowledgeable salespeople. Can’t disagree with him there, but the fish stinks at the head. I sure hope they are gutting the top level management in the stream too.

If not then we’ll be reading about the other half of CompUSA stores closing.

• Blockbuster losing its luster
• 1 in 3 Toys ‘R Us stores might be closing soon
• The Tacoma News Tribune calls over the CompUSA / Apple story
• Rumored list of core and premium Xbox 360 shipping to Best Buy
• Over 65% of Apple stores still carrying iPhones after weekend launch
• Local Sony PS3 availability report #1