CompUSA rarely offered any real bargains. They almost always had the MSRP and Best Buy and Circuit City were often lower - online, Newegg was lower more often than not.  It'll be sad to see Circuit City go because they were often lower priced than Best Buy and carried some stuff Best Buy didn't.

When a store goes into liquidation, the liquidation companies come in and they charge the high prices until the bitter end. Not the stores themselves. Often times the liquidators bring in their own high priced inventory. Now when CompUSA closed stores last year, I got some real good deals on some things. But lots of stuff was never marked down and was often shipped off (the Mac stuff and anything higher end like blu ray burners).

The U.S. car companies don't deserve the credit mess. They produced smaller cars that were great quality the past few years but not many would buy them because everybody wanted an SUV. I just bought a Chevy Cobalt XFE last June and it has been one of the best cars I've ever owned and very fuel efficient. The higher end cars like the Lincolns and Cadillacs and Corvettes have always been better cars.
 
I've owned American, Japanese and German. One Honda Civic was great but couldn't get it repaired cheap. The VW Scirocco was a great car but couldn't get it repaired cheap either. Most of my American cars have been very good to great (two of the great ones were stolen from me). The only good thing about the trouble right now is that they'll finally get to close down all the really bad car dealerships which is where most of the recent blame should go. And by the way, almost everyone is hurting now and going through what we've been going through in Michigan for the past several years. It's getting worse now here because many companies that were able to survive all that time are really getting crushed and are letting workers go left and right. And look for more broadcasting employees to be let go. All the major companies have been whittling their staffs down but next week Clear Channel is expected to let thousands go on Inauguration Day. There's a reason they are called the evil empire.

The banks and all the idiots in the housing market buying what they couldn't afford are the main culprits for this economic crisis with the oil companies and OPEC and Congress bringing up the rear.