Circuit City to Liquidate Remaining U.S. Stores

Sad day for a lot of people.  It means loss of jobs and a competitor in the marketplace.  Should serve notice to the others that they need to try harder.

I agree with Paul. The economy is making it so only the best survive.

@Mark

The economy obviously didn’t make it any better, but surely it can’t be the only thing that went wrong with CC.

They’ve been mismanaged for years and never could compete with Best Buy.

When 35,000 people lose their jobs, it’s a tragedy, but blame has to go beyond the economy.

There are several factors to how it all came to this, but this is how I see it.
1. Early 90’s Best Buy starts selling software, movies, music and thus giving more consumers another reason to return to the store for additional purchases. Circuit came too late in the game to be comptetive.
(extra profit dollars as well)

2. Mid 90’s dropped their slogan “where service is state of the art” and that meant dropping appliances as well as a category. They were the 2nd largest appliance retailer only behind Sears.

3. Car-Max is started and funded using profit dollars that could have been used for more expansion, re-investment etc.

4. DIVX: Need I say more, they lost over 500 million dollars that I am sure they would love to have back now.

5. They sold off their credit card division for extra profit in one years transaction and losing potential long term dollars.

6. Bonehead Executives in 2008 to cut higher hourly employees for lower paying warm bodies.
They decided their customers were not worth the better quality service.

I think the last move was the nail in the coffin for them.
As a former employee of CC it is somewhat sentimental to look back at the good things they did bring to the market. It will be sad that they are no longer around as it is always good to have competition.

I agree with TexasRadio on Everything. I used to work for CC and was let go in September last year. CC has the practice of rewarding the least competent employees. I used to be an installer and I brought them a sales of $200,000, next month they transfer me to Home Builder because I was Underperforming. Now the guy who upsold the most after me only had $2,200. SO let me see: we should transfer the guy that brings in hundreds of thousands and keep the one that brings in a couple. Great Job CC. When we started installation in the Atlanta market I was the only one from CC, everybody else came in because they were friends with the manager. Easter Division installation Manager brought in his friend as Regional manager who then brought in his friend as district manager who in turn hired his friend as Field manager who hired his friend as the supervisor and his friend as lead installer (with no installation experience) and every single installer was his friend….Then of course the logical thing then was to transfer me to the builder section (where you have to work in the cold harsh weather) because i was not one of his friends….Of course when they needed to fire me they came up with this BS about me damaging $4,000 worth of merchandise, when they started reading the list I pointed out to them that all those merchandises where sitting in their office at the time they claimed I damaged them. Their faces dropped when they realized that it was true, but they still fired me for the same exact reason. SO, I do feel for the 30,000 or so people who will lose their jobs but when mangers run CC like their own personal business (in a bad way) and disregard all set Operational procedures nothing good can come out of that.

Don’t attend the liquidation sale; it’s a crock.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMiBVlXctM8

This is a sad day. I’ve been buying from CC for about 20 years. I bought my first SVHS VCR from them, and so much more since then.

DIVX was a disaster. You’re spot on about that. I had no idea they spent that much money on it. Holy cow.

I hope people weren’t buying extended warranties very much in the last few years. I would be very bummed if I needed extended warranty/exchange service and the place that offered it to me was gone.

35,000 people losing their jobs though. Damn that hurts. I used to work CE retail and I know many of those people must be nervous about where to go next. Best of luck to them.

I never thought I’d see segments of our nation unravel in this way. I really hope things turn around in the next year. T

I made the mistake of going to the bank in a strip mall that had a circuit city. It was a joke how many ignorant people had flooded the store looking for a bargain. After about 15 minutes of looking for a spot I finally found one, but had absolutely no intention of going into CC to check the prices. It does not take that much intelligence to realize that liquidation companies are trying to make money and that “sale” prices for a first weekend of a going out of business sale are usually not much if any lower than normal operation, besides that fact that all sales are final. Had these people been shopping at CC the months prior, chances are they would have paid the same or less for the exact same products.

Has anyone checked out http://www.circuitcity.com? It’s turned into an FAQ page that tries to answer any and all questions about the goings-on with the company.

A lot smoother than what happened to Tweeter.

Another factor in all this is the ridiculous salaries taken in my upper management in these large public corporations. They can get away with it as long as the economy can support it but when times get tough many will crumble under the burden. It’s just become an accepted standard that these people take in millions each year for their compensation and most times it’s their stupid decisions that play a big part in the companies demise. Now all the people who actually worked for a living are out of a job and have to find a way to put food on the table, while the upper management already has enough money for numerous lifetimes. I remember the CEO of KMart taking a 6 million dollar bonus when they closed all those stores. If they all just took a reasonable amount and returned more of the profits back into the business and hard working employees, they would be able to survive more difficult times.