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The Last Will and Testament of Circuit City
Harry writes "Sunday is the final day of business for Circuit City, the once-dominant national consumer electronics chain done in by the rise of Best Buy, the crummy economy, and multiple failings of its own. I paid a final visit of respect to my local store, and found that they'd gotten rid of just about all the unopened electronics products, and were therefore selling off stuff like broken computers and the toilet-paper dispenser from the restroom. Whether or not you were ever a fan, it was a sad scene." NPR has a segment on the end of the Circuit City era as well.
Circuit City cut their own throat in a series of dreadful missteps(culminating in their brilliant "Hey, let's sack all the halfway competent salespeople and attempt to hire them back at downright insulting newb wages" scheme), their demise is well deserved. Even in death, their prices are high and their service lousy. Why is their death sad?
I quickly had written it off my list of places to go when it was in business and hadn't been there in years. When they were shutting down, I figured I'd go and check to see what kind of deals were available. Answer? None that I could find. Most things were no better than retail, I could go to Best Buy and get the same price. Oh sure they were "marked down"... but they'd been marked up first. There were a few things I saw that were lower than you might see in most brick and mortar stores, but not by much and not any lower than you'd find online.
I never understood why they thought that their high prices were sustainable. I mean I understand that retail stores charge more than online. No problem, you are paying for the convenience. However they charged more than other retail stores. Well guess what? I can drive to Best Buy just as easy.
Also you can justify higher prices with better service/experience. Some high end AV shops are like that. The prices are high, even when you consider the gear they sell (which is already very high priced) but the service is top notch. You can spend hours milling around, trying out things. They have knowledgeable people who will answer your questions and such. Thus you are willing to pay more.
Well CC didn't have that, at least not the ones I'd tried. Their sales people didn't know shit and were rather pushy.
Ok so if you aren't going for the service, and aren't going for the price, why go? Well the answer to that question for me and apparently many others was "you don't." Thus they are out of business.
I feel bad for their employees as this is not a good time to be looking for a job at all, and probably doubly bad looking for a retail job, but I do not feel bad for Circuit City. They were a crap business, and that's the whole idea in a capitalist market: You run a crap business, you fail and are replaced by someone better. Best Buy is by no means perfect, but they are better than CC.
Circuit City was dead to me when they lauched their DIVX plan back in the late 90's between that and their jacked up warranty policy (back then if you returned an item that you had purchased an extended warranty for, they pocketed the warranty fees) I had vowed never to step foot in one again. I managed to steer free from CC until a few months ago when I went by the local one to pick over the corpse during its going out of business sale.
I really think their biggest problem is the whole time they thought they were competing with Best Buy, but they were really competing with Target, Walmart, and online retailers like Newegg, Buy.com, and TigerDirect. Best Buy should try to learn from their demise.
I Heart Sorting Networks
Even under liquidation they were selling their stuff for maybe 10% off. I can't tell you how many I watched walking out and telling each other "This is why they're going out of business..."
"I am writing this message in representation of the employees of Circuit City here in Richmond who are having to deal with inexcusable conditions being brought on by customers with retribution. Walk into any Circuit City store on any given day and you will find a handful of employees and a sea of customers. The fact that people have flocked to our stores en masse on a daily basis, creating Black-Friday style crowds, has been insulting to our employees and our business alike.
Where was this support when we needed it? Liquidation, for us, has brought great havoc on a series of levels. I've been working for the company for almost two years, and I have never seen anything worse than I have seen over the past month. Customers have gotten enraged over the fact that our discounts aren't good enough for them."
While I only shopped there if I wanted something *now*, I did go in once the closures were announced and you could see people loading up on stuff just because it was some % off. I never saw anything that I couldn't get a similar deal online at the time (and also came with warranty) so I couldn't understand the why people descended on the store en masse. The only explanation I can think of is a feeding frenzy brought on by greed. So from that perspective I can understand where the letters author was coming from
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It was a sad day when Enron closed its doors after making horrible management decisions that cost their employees, customers, and the general public billions. But curiously enough, nobody ever blames management. "The market is bad." Yes, the big bad evil market -- tell me, even in a recession or depression, does the market for electronics suddenly disappear? No. It might shrink, but a business that's properly built will shrink with it, not simply die off. A corporate mass-extinction like this has only one cause: Bad management. Period.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
What happened to their boneheaded execs that cut their own throat? Took their golden parachutes and went screwing other companies?
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
I never put much stock into the psychological games retailers play to get you to buy products until I went into a Circuit City. Whoever they got to design their stores obviously didn't understand what makes people feel at ease and happy. Every time I stepped into a CC, I couldn't wait to get the hell out. Something about the layout, the ceiling, and/or the lighting just made me feel uncomfortable. Then on course, you had the staff. When you wanted help, they were no where around. When you wanted to be left alone, they came in droves.
I admit their online->in store pickup functioned much smoother than Best Buy's.
Ford and GM will be next. It will be sad to seem them go, but someone smarter than the idiots running those companies will fill in their places.
Nobody bailed out Edsel and Packard and tons of other motor corporations 'back in the day' that went under, and the world kept on turning.
If you get lazy and don't inovate or rape your customers (Circuit City) then you eventualy lose. BestBuy is big now sure, but the same thing will happen to them eventually, especially at the rate they discard customers.
I found the exact same thing happened to Radio Shack up here in Canada. It used to be the go-to place for all things electronic. As a kid I remember getting all my project kits and much of my early computer equipment there. The staff were slowly replaced. They went from knowledgeable people who knew what a diode was for to people who had problems operating a screwdriver.
Then as the years went on it got more and more ghetto. The electronics were cheap and the store was littered with useless novelty gadgets nobody wanted. The staff got more and more aggressive with pushing their extended warranties. I worked there for a short time as a kid and the EWPs (Extended Warranty Plans) are pushed so hard it is amazing. Customers are hounded for all their personal details and the staff are trained to tell them it is for warranty information - whether an EWP was involved or not. The wage was hourly but you got more if you sold more of their useless trash and EWPs as it went from an hourly wage to commission if you sold enough.
When Radio Shack got bought out and became 'The Source' it got even worse. My once beloved Radio Shack had become the dictionary definition of everything I hate in a store.
One might ask what all this has to do with Circuit City though. In 2004 Radio Shack was bought out by Circuit City from InterTAN. It then became 'The Source by Circuit City'.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Sometimes when it's 4pm and you need a diode right now and are willing to pay ten bucks to get it, you have no choice but to go to the most well equipped radio shack in the area and shell out.
bought a TV there several years ago. good knowledgeable salesman, steered me away from an idiot mistake i was trying to make, matched my price range and excellent service. Went back several times and paid a higher price than on-line or what it would have cost for BB. when they sacked him and the rest of the competent salesmen, i never went back. I would rather pay 10% more and get excellent service, and 20% more for excellent service and convenience.
They shouldnt blame their customers for simply looking for an honest bargain.
Honest bargains hangout with unicorns and Santa Claus. But more seriously, where does this entitlement attitude come from? There's this mass misconception that products are "marked up". Really? From what baseline? It's like saying pharmaceutical companies are "ripping us off" based solely on the price being charged. Because there's a perception it should be cheaper. But ask those same people about the costs of: accounting, auditing, testing, evaluations, legal representation, insurance, research, development, marketing, quality control, and security. What, did you hear something? No? Me neither, just the wind, and it sounded like it was saying "cheaper, cheaper, cheaper..." Logic be damned.
People are quick to point out it only costs pennies to make a pill, but they think all those other costs should be paid for "by somebody else". No, that's not how business works, and it's just as true in retail as anywhere else. And answering back with crap about "customer loyalty" and "service quality" is just that -- crap. There haven't been "customers" or "clients" in this economy in about 20 years. What we have now is "consumers" -- and consumers do. not. care. about loyalty to the brand or service and quality of manufacture in the vast majority of cases.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Circuit City won't be mourned, except that it's nice to have an alternative everyonce in a while when you need to have something, and it's out of stock at Best Buy. Yes, I get the majority of my media and tech stuff online, but CC didn't start that way, they started as an appliance vendor. So did Best Buy, and there's a nice bright corner of BestBuy that nobody notices that has fridges, stoves, microwaves and that kind of crap you only buy once every ten years. So what did CC do wrong? 1) Crappy selection: Once upon a time, I liked CC's CD selection better than Best Buy: it was large, well organized, and deep. More recently, they've got squat for selection, the same lousy prices as every other retailer, and when they've got big sales, everything's just basically in a pile, no alphabetizing to speak of beyond the first initial, if you're lucky. 2) Crappy service: Buying a camera or a laptop (I helped an idiot relative buy one of each, even though I told her the prices could be beaten online), requires the attention of a sales droid, and printing out about eight yards of paper, none of which are a receipt. 3)Computers, HD-TV, Blu-Ray are a commodity: if you can get them in WalMart, they're not a specialty item. Don't sell them like they are. but mainly 4) Failed to adapt: Their stores continued, even after recent revamps, to look dark and scary, the way TV stores always used to look in the 70's. Who wants to go in there? The color red may have been a failure too: it means warning, danger, stay away (then again, BestBuy's black on yellow is the classic warning color combo, our eyes see that contrast better than anything else). I seldom went into a Circuit City. The ones nearest to me were closed long ago (one's an Off Track Betting parlor, another became a Bed Bath and Beyond). They won't be missed.
Design for Use, not Construction!
Circuit City is text book example of what attempting to become very rich very quickly almost always results in. It is a perfect analog of the national and world economy. The blue print for demise Circuit City followed:
Action: Remove staff with knowledge and ability and start paying less to less capable people.
Reason: Keep immediate profits high.
Outcome: Reduced sales due to less customer service.
Action: Leave prices high.
Reason: Keep immediate profits high.
Outcome: Failing to see that the consumer electronics market is shifting to a Walmart model (aggressive pricing, low profit, high volume) sales go down.
Action: Eliminate deep discounts on open box, out of production, or discontinued merchandise.
Reason: Keep immediate profits high.
Outcome: Reduced repeat and casual traffic resulting in reduced sales.
This is what happens when any business runs itself based on the principle of "Keep immediate profits high" rather than "Keep customers coming back".
Gordon Gecko was wrong - greed is bad.
Over the years I've bought a couple of laptops at Circuit City, mostly because I found them at a good discount. Service was either non-existent or worse: it took them 15 minutes to fetch from their stockroom what I asked for, and then it was up to me to notice that the model number was the wrong one. They didn't know what they were selling.
It was also downright insulting when they checked at the exit all bag contents against the sales slip, radiating suspicion that their customers were thieves. Fry's Electronics has an exit check too, but much more low-key
These days I tend to visit B&M stores for a hands-on experience and then order what I choose online. I would accept paying a $50 markup for the convenience of having a $1000 laptop in my hands on the spot, but B&Ms seem to want more than that. It doesn't fly.
Banks notoriously like to post your transactions NOT in the order in which you make them, but in the order the merchant reports them. ...
So if you've got a balance of $1,000 on close-of-business Friday, make $900 worth of purchases over the weekend, you should have a balance of $100.
First thing Monday, you know you've got a large bill coming due on Wednesday, so you make a $500 deposit, thus bringing your balance to $600.
You make the payment Wednesday, taking your balance down to $50, and your Cheque Register (& spreadsheet) show your balance as $50.
Except the Bank posted them in some twisted order that leaves you with $200 worth of NSF fees because you supposedly left your account overdrawn.
And there isn't a damned thing you can do about it because they say "We can't control when the Merchants post your transactions."
Yeah, except my Cheque Register & spreadsheet show all my transactions AND the balances, and MY numbers don't match YOUR numbers.
Guess who loses - it sure as hell isn't the bank because YOU get to pony-up the NSF fees.
Changing banks won't help, they all do it.
So, please, honestly, explain to me how the spreadsheet is supposed to help?
It hasn't so far, and I'm so anal-retentive when it comes to my money, it pisses me off that I can double-check my math with a calculator & come up with the same answers every time, but the bank seems to be pulling numbers out of its ass
=(
Only in America would anyone consider mourning the closing of a retail store.
Fucking pathetic really...