Apparently we weren't the only ones peeved by the absence of Macs in the the Sunday color supplements; over 1700 people so far have signed our petition requesting that CompUSA start advertising Macs in its Sunday circulars. But despite our best intentions, several viewers have written in to mention that our efforts are misguided, as the ads we all see every week in the Sunday newspaper are actually prepared months in advance. Now, we at AtAT won't pretend to know anything at all about national retail advertising, so we'll have to take that information at face value-- though it does raise two questions: Why on earth would ads for computers (whose specs and prices change constantly) be prepared "months in advance," and given that the CompUSA deal was announced a few months ago, why aren't we seeing Apple systems advertised in CompUSA's circulars yet?

Well, it seems to us that we're blessed with a benevolent genie, because no sooner did these questions pop into our eager little heads then a faithful viewer with inside information dropped some answers right into our waiting inbox. This viewer confirms that newspaper circulars are indeed prepared months in advance, and this is possible because "all manufacture promotions, sale prices, etc. are usually scheduled the quarter before." (As unfathomable as that is to us, we're willing to accept this strange concept of "planning ahead.") Our informant goes on to state that the only reason we haven't seen Mac ads from CompUSA is because when the conversion process was started several months ago, neither they nor Apple could be completely sure that all of the store-within-a-store remodelings would be done by the scheduled date. Sure would look stupid if a great big Apple/CompUSA ad appeared in the Sunday paper and the local store still only had two broken 6500's a copy of Myst, right? So they added in a buffer zone.

So our anonymous viewer advises us to sit tight, because a huge Apple/CompUSA ad is scheduled to appear in Sunday newspapers across the country on March 15th-- a date that agrees with Mac OS Rumors' sources, incidentally. According to both sources, that weekend there will be a grand opening of the salon stores to the public, which should be an event worth attending. We're keeping our schedules clear. And we're still submitting the petition-- just in case.