Circus City
11 November 2008Last week Circuit City announced they were closing 20% of their stores, including the one closest to me that opened only a few months ago. Monday they announced they were filing for protection under Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
I’m no fan of Circuit City. Then again, I hate Best Buy, too. We all know that the salespeople suck at both places. If you know what you want, you’re just fine and may need someone to point you toward the routers, if they know what that means. If you’re going into either one for advice, do your research before you set out on the trip. The store that’s closing in Parker, Colorado: I predict that when empty the technological know-how in the building doesn’t drop significantly. When CompUSA folded last year I think some of the Geek IQ in the stores actually increased when empty.
Interesting item on NPR’s All Things Considered about Circuit City today. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96875266
Evidently Circuit City laid off anyone “high paid” who actually knew what they were doing while keeping the idiots. At the same time, they paid their CEO a salary of $8,000,000 a year. Best Buy, meanwhile, paid their CEO “only” $4,000,000 a year. (Okay, I’ve bitched about CEO salary enough, but when a company is losing money it’s truly ridiculous that they keep paying their CEO so much.) They also put stores in stupid locations which were cheap and anchors at the time, but now they’re out of the way.
Will Circuit City emerge from bankruptcy? I kinda doubt it. Not unless they really get their act together, hire some people who know what they’re doing, stock their stores properly (seems that the movies are never in any sort of order), clean ‘em up (I always feel like I need a shower after going into one), and can their CEO to bring in someone who’ll make a reasonable salary and bring people back into the stores. When they vanish, Best Buy will have a corner on that market. For a while. Fry’s may just have to go bigger. Or a new player will emerge. Perhaps someone will learn from the mistakes made by Circuit City.
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