Why Circuit City’s Bankrupt
So I stop by my local Circuit City this evening to see if anything worth buying is on sale. I actually have a couple of items in mind. However, the game I want is selling at full list price, despite the going out of business “sale”. The camera I want is actually 10% off, at which price it is still a couple of hundred dollars more expensive than the same camera on Amazon. I do pick up one cheap game that is actually 14 cents less than the price on Amazon, sales tax included.
For all the talk about how Wal-mart killed Circuit City, I’ve never found especially good prices on electronics at Wal-mart (or Target, or K-Mart, or similar); and I’ve never found competent service at Circuity City either, even before the layoffs. It’s Amazon and eBay other web stores that are killing the big box retailers, especially for high margin items that don’t cost a lot to ship. It’s amazing that anyone still buys anything at brick-and-mortar stores like Circuit City and Best Buy.
January 23rd, 2009 at 12:32 PM
I stopped by on my way home earlier in the week. There were a few 30% off signs but most things seemed to be 10% off or no discount at all. It seems that Circuit City isn’t any better at running a going out of business sale than it was at staying in business in the first place.My nephew was one of the sales people they let go, he declined the opportunity to re-apply. He told me that they axed all of the higher paid people who also happened to be the ones with the most product knowledge (in his case TVs). I guess there really is a corporate death penalty and Circuit City was begging for it.
January 25th, 2009 at 10:15 AM
Circuit City doesn’t “run” the liquidation sale, it is done by a liquidation company that specializes at this thing. I believe this is the same one that did liquidation for CompUSA stores, so you’ll never get any good deals as they have found out it is quite profitable to sucker people in with their “going out of business signs” and have people pay premium for items the want to get rid off.