Tandy Agrees to Buy Computer City Store

Tandy Corp., the Fort Worth-based computer manufacturer and retailer, has agreed to acquire the Computer City SuperCenter store here as part of an effort to launch a national chain of personal computer super-stores.

Tandy said it plans to open a warehouse-style computer store in Garden Grove and to open as many as six more stores in 1991, one of them in Los Angeles. The stores will offer the top-selling computer brands--Apple, Compaq, IBM and Tandy.

“We feel the changing buying habits of consumers and the success of the warehouse-style retail formats made this necessary,” Lowell Duncan, Tandy vice president of marketing, said Friday. “We think a greater number of computers will be sold through super-stores, and we wanted to participate.”

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The Computer City store was opened in 1989 as a joint venture between Mitsubishi Corp. and Inacomp Computer Centers, a computer chain based in Troy, Mich. Inacomp officials announced plans at that time to open 20 stores in three to five years.

The 20,000-square-foot Garden Grove store, patterned after large electronics super-stores such as Circuit City, would be much larger than Tandy’s national chain of Radio Shack electronics stores. The super-stores emphasize high-volume, low prices and heavy advertising.

Tandy will also open a number of smaller stores, to be called Computer City Super-Satellites, in metropolitan regions. Those stores, like the ones in the Computer City chain, will sell a variety of computer brands, marking the first time Tandy will sell computers other than its own.

Industry analysts estimate that super-stores such as Dallas-based CompUSA will account for 20% of personal computer sales by the mid-1990s.