Who should get the “Fawlty Towers of Retail” award this year? My vote goes to CompUSA where every customer is harassed at the door as he or she leaves. I was just in the downtown San Francisco store yesterday. I had not been in a CompUSA store in a year and I had forgotten about the abysmal way they treat customers. When you leave, there are two people at the door who demand to see your bags and your receipt. They assume that that everyone is stealing from them.

Today I returned the DVDs (wrong format) that I bought yesterday and as I waited my turn, I watched two CompUSA employees check bags, backpacks, and packages of bewildered customers. Some of these customers had stuffed the receipts deep inside a wallet and had to fish out that wallet and show the door persons that no, they were not thieves. What a lovely shopping experience!

I don’t understand why CompUSA doesn’t go into the “Prisons and Torture” business given that they subject people to humiliation and harassment everyday and must have, by now, developed some expertise for which they could actually get paid. There’s a lot of contract work right now in Iraq and in other countries where giving human beings a hard time is very lucrative business.

If you have better candidates for the Fawlty Towers of Retail award, please post in the comment section below.

Sphere: Related Content