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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.
Years ago, when I first moved to California, I had never seen a Circuit City, only Best Buys (and was suitably appalled by BB and business practices, they tried a bait and switch on me once).
I found the Circuit Citys I saw to be clean, maintained, decent prices, friendly employees. But then, a few years ago, I noticed a reversal taking place - the CCs near me had become, for lack of a better word, 'ghetto' - unfriendly employees, broken equipment on display, and lack of product - while the Best Buys had cleaned up and trained their employees. I switched back to BB, occasionally walking into CCs, and finding them just getting worse and worse.
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Actually that sort of thing is handled by the liquidation company and in no way is set by the former Circuit City management.
Basically, as in all liquidation sales, they put everything up to MSRP, then take 10%(or whatever the starting discount is) off. Chances are you'd have gotten a better deal the week before liquidation began.
Why is their death sad?
For a lot of people the only substantial consumer electronics retailers are best buy and circuit city. After circuit city is officially gone, best buy will have numerous markets without even token competition for consumer electronics (unless you count walmart). Hence even losing a lousy retailer is still a loss for the consumer. One could potentially expect to see best buy starting to carry even less variety of product, as they won't have much to worry about competing against.
I guess I view it differently than you. The loss of a lousy retailer provides an opening for a better store to compete in the electronics market. It's capitalism at work... out with the old and weak and in with the new.
CC went out of business because they were not able to maintain their relevancy. Now there are free customers and space in town for someone to try out some new business concepts in the electronics market.
Personally, these days it's hard for me not to just order what I want online. And I don't do that because it is cheaper, I do it because it is easier than driving down to the store, parking, wading through all the other shoppers and trying to find the item I want. The retailers never carry the computer monitor or accessory that I want in the store anyway. (No, I don't want integrated speakers on my monitor, thank you.)
It is sad for so many employees there. It is certainly easy for us to sit here and comment on how crap their knowledge was, blah, blah, blah. But in reality, most of the people that worked there were not bad people. They were in a bad business, though. Their company did not support them through adequate training, etc. Couple this with declining margins, and the bottom falling out of several of their key products (PCs, TVs, etc) and they didn't really stand a chance. So all of the points here are valid, but I really feel for some of those folks that showed up, and worked to the best of their abilities. This is a shitty time to be looking for a new job.
I agree. I went in there a couple of weeks ago to see if there was anything worth buying. Even with all the discounts I couldn't find a thing. I was actually in the market for a keyboard - for which I would normally pay $0-$5 - and couldn't find anything under $50. They were selling 500G hard drives for more than it cost me to get a 1T drive months ago.
In general, retail prices suck - but retail stores do offer you the opportunity to try products in person. What we need is some hybrid model, say for example an Amazon store.
In such a store they would have many products on display or people to answer your questions about them, and for books they could have ebook readers and comfy sofas to let you browse most of their selection (most of it is print-on-demand anyway so they could do this), but there would be no need for the warehouse at the back for stock. You try things out there and order either there or at home, and a few days later your item is delivered.
There is of course no guarantee that people would actually buy the product from Amazon rather than anywhere else, but by providing such a service the company would gain goodwill, and they already manage that a similar risk when it comes to their review system. If a company makes it really convenient for you to figure out what you need, and they provide you the option to buy at a reasonable price, most people will buy. Companies like Amazon already provide that to some extent, but you can't try the product unless you find a retail store that carries it. And those are dropping like flies.
Places like circuit city make it easy for you to believe that what they want to sell you is the thing you want, and they give you the option to buy at an unreasonable price. That's a lose lose scenario.
There's the time I was pricing DVD drives, and got thrown out of the store because I dared to -write down- prices.
And the time we bought a 'open box return' DLT TV, and the bulb blew out a couple weeks later. The installer pointed out there was about 150 hours on the bulb, a lot more than you'd expect for an 'open box', but consistent with this as a demo/floor model.
My neighbor had a disastrous experience with their installation service, he ended up having to redo it all.
And of course, that's before their dumb-assed management failures. Unfortunately, I'm sure the -corporate officers- won't suffer (except in the loss of future rip-off income...)
So Good Riddance, Circuit City! You sucked!
I know for a fact that they raised the prices on the DVDs. They didn't mark the DVDs down, but it was 10% or 20% off the sticker price, which had gone up from the day or two before when I was browsing them.
Okay, so I know I'm sticking my neck out here by admitting this on /., but I work at Best Buy. I can also say that no one in a Best Buy store below a supervisor position has any fear of losing their job any time soon unless their store is SEVERELY under performing. Maybe it's not the whole company, but I'll tell you at my store if a supervisor wants to fire someone and goes to a manager (since a sup can't fire an employee) the first thing the manager will ask is what the sup has enacted to correct the behavioral issue with the employee. We're not graded on magazine subscriptions and haven't been for a year+ and even then it was only cashiers that ever were (not salespeople) and I doubt anyone actually got fired for it. As far as selling the service plans, we have periodic corporate memos going to all employees that care to read them saying that the service plan is not for everyone and that our job is to let the customer know they have the option, not that they have to have it. Sure management would like you to try to sell it and show the value in the plan, but no one CAN get fired for not selling a service plan, let alone actually does.
Say what you will about the customer experience but don't claim the employee experience is something it's not.
My whole state of Maryland only has one Microcenter and it's miles from me. Microcenter seems to have very conservative growth plans. I'm hoping this will interest them in moving into the void left by Circuit City, MC is way better than BestBuy or Circuit City.
One drawback I find with buying non-media products from Amazon, as opposed to in a store, is that they put absolutely zero effort into checking the product before it ships. I've ordered very few non-media items from them, but have had two separate occasions where the product was severely damaged in a way that couldn't have happened during shipping - e.g., the shipping box for one item was fine, but the product's box had severe water damage. I've bought many, many more electronics in physical stores and never had to deal with people trying to sell me something with such obvious damage.
That written, I've yet to have problems returning things to Amazon and do still order non-media from them occasionally. I just keep my expectations low that things will work out right the first time.
It also seems that Amazon understands of customer service. I ordered an external hard drive and on the day that fedex reported it delivered, there was no package at my house. I called Amazon at 6:15 AM or so the next day on the off chance that someone would be able to help me. Actually I used the website and had them call me. Anyway they overnighted me a replacement drive, no questions asked. It would have been completely reasonable for the lady to ask me to wait one more day and see if it arrives and call again if not. But instead they decided to give me the benefit of the doubt, which is impressive these days.
One anecdote doesn't count for much I know, but it's a pretty sharp contrast to the anecdotes I'm reading about CC, and to my own experience at CC.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
Gee... my network card just fizzled. I guess I'll just hop on to Newegg to buy a new one. Hey... why won't the page load?
Asshat.
The Circuit City near my house had those great big "Going out of business, massive discounts" signs up, so I decided to go inside and take a look.
There was nothing I couldn't find for cheaper online, even including the price of S&H.
I was quite surprised, though, to find some plain, 256 MB sticks of PC133 SDRAM (you know, the stuff that came before DDR). It was some plain Circuit City branded stuff. I was mildly pleased to see that that Circuit City catered to people with old computers.
Then I saw the price tag. They were trying to sell it for $109.
One hundred and nine dollars. For technology that's fifteen years old, and has been mostly obsolete for the last five.
What the fuck.
I was so appalled by this that I actually asked one of their sales associates why they were charging such an unreasonable price for obsolete hardware. He responded in true Slashdot fashion, with a car analogy: "It's like the way people pay lots of money for an old car - it's old, but good!".
So yeah. They're going out of business because, apparently, nobody there knows anything about anything.
My sentiments exactly, I went to my local CC during the closeout looking for a wireless-N router I know to be right around $100 at Best Buy, even with 40% off the one at CC was still $120. The only real deals would be with some of the new video games that had been released in the last few months, which were 40% off from $50 or $60. However I ended up buying an older game which was about $24 after the 40%. I went to the nearby Best Buy afterward and saw it for $19.99.
Having an extensive memory like I do and also having lived in Richmond many years ago and then most recently; I feel I have a pretty damn good over view of the whole fiasco. The problem was with management. The problem was with management every single step of the way.
When I was a teenager, Circuit City was THE place to buy anything electronic. Why? The salespeople worked on commission so it was in their best interests to know what they were talking about. You could stand and talk with them for however long it took and the lions' share of them knew what they were talking about in every aspect of what you were considering buying. The service was so good that people used to refer other people to the salesman that had helped them by name.
I can remember CC winning design awards for stereo eq that came out on occassion as well as many other things. At the same time, their return policy was bar none, the best you could get anywhere. So what happened?
First, management decided they wanted a larger chunk of their employees pay. To that end, they cut all the salespeople and offered them entry level wages on a per hour basis. Almost immediately, the good sales people left. They moved on to greener pastures. Instead of walking in and talking to someone who knew what they were talking about, you got a teenager who was more concerned with who he or she was going out with on Friday night. Not that there is anything wrong with teenagers, I used to be one too. But, a teenager making minimum wage is never going to be able to compete with someone who lives and breathes whatever the product is that they are selling.
Next came the elimination of the large appliances. Who is honestly going to buy a washer and dryer from a 16 year old kid? You see, when people realized it was kids in there, the high dollar purchases ended. It ceased being THE store and became a store...like so many others. As many of the commissioned sales people left, many of the management also left. What they were left with was a company with salespeople who did not understand what they were selling along with a management team whose understanding of technology was "It's the next big thing!"
In a mad dash to recoup the losses generated by idiot management, they turned to many deals that were ill advised at best. The most glaring of these was the DIVX support. They tied almost all of their fortune to Toshiba and in turn provided the buffer zone financially if the whole thing fell apart. As we all know...Americans like to own their media (we can argue about that later).
When DIVX collapsed as everyone who knew anything about formats knew it was going to, CC took the brunt of it. Then as we all know, the dot com boom blew out and that was it. One of my favorite incidences that occurred was about 10 years or so ago, you found out you had been laid off on Monday mornings by a sign on your desk. If your stuff was in a box and there was Kleenex next to it on your desk and a security guard in your department wandering around, you were laid off. You can only do that so many times to employees in your headquarter town before you hit a point where noll amount of advertising is going to save your company from bad press.
But, time had moved on and Best Buy had shown up on the sidleines and was edging their way in. BB opened stores that were clean and bright and made their fortune off of friendly helpful people who knew what they were doing. As CC began to circle the drain, more stores closed, more layoffs took place, items got cheaper and their price went up. Where at one time in CC you could walk in and buy just about anything for a great price and have your neighbors over and have them oohh and ahh for the next three days; now, it was a shady looking place where you kind of expected someone to offer you 'grey market' items in a dark corner.
They never dropped their prices after they stopped paying their commissioned salespeople. In many ways, CC was THE MOST EXPENSIVE place to buy something. Yes, you
"Those of us who are afraid of Uncle Sam spying on all our credit card transactions are called paranoid."
My credit card purchases are not useful information for even the most toxic government. If anything they just add to the data burden such government would have to sift through.
If you decide to do things you don't wish government to be aware of, that same innocent activity becomes your smokescreen. You can manipulate the perception people have of you by what you reveal to them. You could even fake a persona by your choice of purchase, especially media. The way to hide FROM the system is to hide IN the system.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I think there are several poor business decisions that the company made in the past 10 years or so that can explain why they failed. Starting with their venture into the DIVX fiasco (hint: if your "partner" in a business venture is a law firm, it's probably one to avoid). They probably could have recovered after they finally killed DIVX, if it wasn't for also deciding to get out of the major appliances business. Talk about pure stupidity there -- you see, most major appliances customers are older people, homeowners, with money, and while they're buying that refrigerator or dishwasher today, in six months, they'll probably be looking for a new wide screen television or laptop. Getting rid of appliances just eliminated a huge segment of the market, and lots of sales!
Mistake #3 was just simply not figuring out your basic store structure. After I left the company, every time I walked into the store, I swear to God, they had a new format and arrangement! I could never find anything! If you can't figure out something as simple as this, you're doomed. Going along with this, Firedog was simply at least three years too late in responding to the Geek Squad -- Best Buy won that one easily.
The final nail in the coffin (and I'm sure this has already been stated in this thread somewhere, but I'll put it here just for my own completeness) is firing all of their experienced salespeople and replacing them with non-commissioned, inexperienced, Wal-Mart-esque, clerks. I do understand that ultimately, they had to ditch the commissioned model, simply because of the change in the marketplace. But they went about it totally wrong -- a better solution would be to take advantage of the high turnover rate in retail as it is, and just not hire new commissioned salespeople, and grandfather the experienced ones, who can then be a huge resource to the newer salespeople in teaching them the ropes.
So, it's sad to see them go, but not surprising based on their business decisions of the past 10 years. I did learn a lot from working there back in the 90s, especially regarding computers, installations, and technology in general, so I thank them for that. In the meantime, I guess I'll get my electronics from Newegg or TigerDirect. At least until some new entrepreneur decides to open up a Buy More,... ;-)
Are you really that naive? Seriously?
It's easy to marginalize somebodies opinion by calling them "paranoid". That does not address the fact that government after 911 IS looking for tools to fight terrorism. The credit card companies already analyze purchasing habits to fight fraud. Is it really that much of a stretch that the credit card companies are going to use this data to provide targeted advertising? Detailed profiles on individual customers?
Of course they ARE. It's already happening. So why on Earth would the government not want in to start using that profile data to fight terrorism?
They ARE. There is a large list of items such as pre-paid cell phones that the government flags to start profiling certain people to determine just what threat they may represent. Purchase a pre-paid cell phone and have a middle eastern last name? Welcome to the "no-fly" list in the airlines.
Yeah, call us paranoid. There is no way governments have EVER been caught abusing their powers. Nope. No Sirrree.
Wait..... Wasn't Hoover obsessed with Martin Luther King and wrote scathing letters about he hated the man and abused his powers to spy on him and THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS of others? Those are little things we call FACTS now aren't they?
Nahhhh. You're still right. We can trust everyone in the government to only violate our privacy when ABSOLUTELY necessary. I stand corrected and I see your point *now*. Gosh, I feel better.
I worked in there on weekends for a third party company "selling" crap software. I put selling in quotations because in reality this meant jacking off for four hours. I came in, punched in via telephone, went to Panera Bread, ate breakfast, came back, stood around for an hour or so, went out to lunch, came back and stood around for a while. When I wasn't screwing around in the break room or out eating, I was screwing around with CC employees, joking around with them, making fun of dumb customers. Making fun of a customer that used the term "Gigapixel" stands out. The worst part of it all was that I got paid like twice the minimum wage for doing this. I heard other employees talk about how execs, store managers, assistant store managers, and district managers made crap loads of money also. Also factor in that instead of having commissioned sales people, it was like reversed. People that didn't have high sales would get less and less hours. The top sales person at the one store I visited didn't know crap about computers. Another employee lashed out at me for trying to help him explain something that he didn't fully understand. So yeah, it was a group of high school, right out of high school kids. I had fun, but I feel bad for the people that really depended on those jobs.
Or a rotating stock plan. Something new at Amazon, they put it in the stores, a few weeks later they refresh with newer stuff.
You also have catalogues and catalogue computers there, so people can look stuff up, and the sales staff is there to help them find what they need, or answer their questions about products. Sadly, you can't stock the entire Amazon inventory, so you'd have to have the items shipped. However, they could easily put in a warehouse in some of the bigger regions, and send them out from there, or to the store, and hopefully have it in by a day or two, or even that day if the customer's in a pinch and doesn't mind driving over.
You haven't worked at Best Buy long enough to know better.
I worked at a Best Buy back in the late 90's and early 2000's, eventually becoming the Senior product specialist in the Computer department. The service plan USED to be pushed VERY hard. We were graded on the percentage of overall revenue that was service plans. I remember being told by MANAGERS, not supervisors, that if some customer didn't want to buy the $220 service plan with their $2000 laptop, that I should discourage them from buying it, or try to get them into a cheaper one. We learned all the tricks, what to point out that looked fragile or otherwise likely to break due to "normal wear and tear", etc.
It was always a big deal that we weren't supposed to "inboard", which meant reducing the price of something in order to get the customer to buy the service plan. But the unwritten rule was to not get caught doing it, since reducing the price to include the service plan both got the sale and increased the percentage of the sale that was the service plan.
This may sound really weird to you now, but back in the day, we'd set people up with the computer, and staple the service plan 8.5x11 trifold brochure to the - what's it called, the 3 part carbon copy paper they use to change prices. Anyway, the brochure used to have a blank square on the bottom of the back page, where you wrote in your employee number. Even though there was no commission, they kept track of individual performance, and would use that in your performance reviews, etc.
It's gotten better. When they refocused (after i left) on making the sale and getting the revenue, it became a more pleasant place to shop.
~X
sig?
One word: DIVX. When they came out supporting that abomination, it was the beginning of the end.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
I for one was happy to see Circuit City bite the big one. Every time I visited a store to comparison shop I left without buying - going elsewhere (usually Best Buy) for a better deal or simply because they didn't have what I was looking for. Whether it was computer components, video capture cards or what-not, Circuit City either had a severely limited selection of bottom of the barrel items or no selection at all... and they always were higher priced than every other place I checked, including some local specialty shops. So I thumb my nose at them, give them the bird and smile from ear to ear. Good riddance.