Gateway will be closing all of its remaining retail stores (188 of them with approximately 2500 jobs).  I’m not terribly surprised by this.  Last year when I still lived in Denton I went on the hunt for a new laptop.  I drove down to Lewisville and went to Best Buy, the Gateway Store, and Compusa.  I previously wrote about my dislike for Best Buy.  However, the experience at the Gateway Store was also disappointing, but for a different reason.  The store was simply a front for their web/phone order system.  You would go in and most of the equipment wasn’t available in the store.  When I go into a retail store I generally expect to be able to walk out with the product.  It was frustrating to me when they said that the model I wanted had to be ordered and would be shipped.  Since my goal was to have a laptop in hand when I returned home that day I left and went back across I-35 to Compusa.  A few weeks later that Gateway store closed. 

I can understand the need to custom order certain configurations of a system.  In fact, I know that some stores do this.  But a computer store is also expected to have stock on hand for immediate delivery.  If all they’re doing is acting as an order taker and then shipping it to your house, that’s next to useless for most people who go out to buy something that day.