Circuit City needed the consumer electronics equivalent of Gordon Ramsay to come in and say:
1. Your store looks like ass, clean it up.
2. You fired the best sales staff to save money. You're morons, go and beg them to come back.
3. Your name sucks. Who the hell wants a 'Circuit'? Rebrand.
I'm sad to see it fail, but especially after the sackings of experienced sales people, I can hardly say I'm surprised.
Agreed. What's sad is that it's the same old story - the CEO flew the company into a mountain, and gets rich for doing it. A responsible board of directors would have showed him the door - sans bonus - when he fired all of the experienced sales staff to cut costs. Unfortunately, there aren't many boards in the U.S that are looking out for their shareholders.
If you look at the board ( http://investor.circuitcity.com/directors.cfm ), there doesn't seem to be much direct retail or electronics experience. Most of the individuals seem to come from finance or service industry backgrounds. Perhaps the board was attempting to be responsible but simply did not have the background necessary for evaluating the business.
I had to get a part time job to support myself in grad school. The first offer I got was a local Circuit City. I worked at that location for about 6 months, and then moved to the 3rd largest store in the chain when I transfered schools.
I was a customer service associate and, yes CSA's, as they called us, were the lowest paid position. Never underestimate the value of quality customer service! On top of that, lazy managers always had me do tasks they didn't feel like working on...by the time I left that store, I had the access codes for every manager except the Store Director! I could move inventory, receive shipments, alter time-cards, etc...and I was getting paid $9/hr.
About time. They've been thrashing around long enough and the store near me is already in shambles as employees have apparently stopped caring.
But it's a reminder that a struggling company isn't always going to get bought out. Circuit City simply couldn't compete with Best Buy, and they're both being increasingly squeezed by Wal-Mart and Target.
Circuit City will remind Best Buy that it's perch isn't safe.
One thing that jumped out at me is that Best Buy is not a "tech" name, so they could in theory (I'm not necessarily saying they should, only that they could) have a rebirth as a Target, Walmart, K-mart competitor.
I can't say I'm surprised. The few times I've gone in there recently to purchase something, I couldn't believe the outrageous prices. $49 for a 1M "digital" optical cable? $99 for an HDMI cable? Everything was massively overpriced, and this is factoring in that I was willing to pay more than online prices for local shopping/instant gratification, but not 40% more.
I'm sad to see them go. Locally my only real choices for electronics are Best Buy and Circuit City. I loathe going to Best Buy - the service is crap, the stores are cluttered, and in general it's just a miserable shopping experience. And don't get me started on the Geek Squad...
I find that NewEgg is more than adequate for any sort of tech purchase. I guess that if people are going to be spending a lot on expensive tech equipment (and nearly all of it is expensive) then they'd probably like to see it in person first.
I concur. NewEgg gets 99.9% of all my tech-related purchases. It's too bad that Circuit City couldn't survive, but I've only been in my local store once in the past year (and IIRC, I didn't buy anything then and left empty-handed.)
In "fairness", the first couple chapters of the book was a disclaimer about how the companies were already great, but Collins' couldn't be blamed if they because crappy after the book was published. It looks like most of what went wrong with Circuit City went wrong in the last 8 years.
