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Circuit City Closes Its Doors For Good
bsharma is amongst the hordes of people wanting us to share the news that long beleaguered retailer Circuit City has finally decided to close for good, asking for court approval to close the remaining 567 US stores. "Whalin said management mistakes over the past few years combined with the recession brought down Circuit City. 'This company made massive mistakes,' he said, citing a decision to get rid of sales people and other mismanagement. What's more, given the credit market freeze, Whalin added that no manufacturer wants to sell to any retailer who doesn't have money to pay for the merchandise. At the same time, Whalin said there's still a very slim chance that one or more firms that have expressed an interest in buying Circuit City could still buy it out of bankruptcy over the next few days."
...what's to stop Best Buy from inflating their already-borderline-ridiculous prices even further?
Target, Wallmart, Sam's Club, local retailers, amazon, newegg, froogle, etc...
I worked at Circuit City from 2000 to 2003, and this was not the case for us.
I cannot speak for CC nationwide, as I was in a store in the northeast, but we had a "price match plus" policy. If you found a lower price from a brick and mortar store, and you or we could verify it, we matched the price and beat it by 10% of the difference. Perhaps this was not the case before or after I was there, or in different regions.
To the best of my knowledge, prices were also identical to the competition. Every weekend a small group of us would comb through every newspaper they brought in, and would familiarize ourselves with what the competition was advertising in their flyers. We were usually the ones to announce to customers that a certain item was on a price match sale, and managers were supportive in helping us get them that lower price. We would call or go online to verify a better price if needed. Only very rarely did a customer find a lower price elsewhere and bring it to our attention.
Now, I also think this was the "best" time for customers with CC. They had come out of a DivX salesman era, which stained the companies opinions in many peoples minds. The company started to revise its checkout system, and brighten up stores, as well as introduced a completely new layout for the new stores. But it was still playing catchup to the other guys. The same poor management was running the show. Any progress here was lost with the changes to the payment structure which lost a lot of good will with loyal employees, which were later outright laid off. Then they were just slow with keeping up with the competition with Firedog, and never had the kind of HDTV showcasing that Best Buy was able to foster.
The rise of Best Buy and Walmart did the company in, with superior selection, store layout, and even colors. Seriously, Blue and White or Blue and Yellow, just flat out beat Red and Black. Our stores were dark, dated, they felt old, the store was like the weird used car salesman of electronics. While the "we don't have checkout counters" idea was an interesting experiment, it was a failed one that the company never truly fixed. A poorly run company can survive in the absence of great competition, and I think CC was floundering for the past decade. Semi-competent (at least more competent than Circuit City) competition and a recession is all it took.