<p>…and over 30,000 people will lose their jobs. What a shame - I am sure H will be looking for deals with the liquidation but I really feel for all affected…</p>
<p>[ABC</a> News: Circuit City to Liquidate Remaining US Stores](<a href=“http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Economy/wireStory?id=6662902]ABC”>http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Economy/wireStory?id=6662902)</p>
<p>I’ve been carrying a Circuit City gift card with $26 on it for a year or two now. I guess I should try to hurry up and use it or just toss it in the garbage.</p>
<p>Everybody watch for a post coming soon from a certain other dad about the smokin’ deal he got on some gadget at Circuit City! :D</p>
<p>This is unfortunate. The customer service at Circuit City has been fantastic in the past year or so. When you walk into the store there is a person who asks you what you are looking for an tells you where those items are. That person saved me so much time. I will miss Circuit City.</p>
<p>The Good Guys was gone. Comp USA was gone. Circuit City was gone. When will be Best Buy, Radio Shack?</p>
<p>I always preferred shopping in Circuit City but I would typically buy things in Best Buy even though I hated the store layout and customer service. For the most part, Best Buy has a better product mix for the kinds of things that I shop for as a computer hobbyist.</p>
<p>In our city, the Best Buy is next to Circuit City. The one thing that Circuit City did well is their parking lot. The Best Buy lot is awful for traffic management so everyone parks in the Circuit City parking lot and walks over to Best Buy to shop.</p>
<p>Radio Shack is a survivor and has morphed itself many times over the decades to remain in business.</p>
<p>We don’t have a Best Buy. When Circuit City closed my husband was sad. He loved there parking lot. Easiest one in town to find a parking place. With Comp USA already closed we don’t presently have any of the big box electronic stores within 45 minutes.</p>
<p>They started going downhill when their CEO decided to let all the senior retail staff go…the ones who knew where things were and how it all fit together. They were fired because they were paid more than the newbies who hadn’t figured it out yet. The bad publicity and the lack of smart sales staff was the beginning of the end.</p>
<p>But I bet that CEO is walking away with a mint o’ money!</p>
<p>^^ They were headed downhill before that decision to lay off the senior staff - that’s why they made that move. It doesn’t look like it helped much.</p>
<p>CCity started out in Richmond about four decades ago as Dixie Hi-Fi. Hey remeber hi-fi?</p>
<p>There was a fun piece in the Onion about two weeks back that questioned Radio Shack’s survival with product mix of all things obsolete, ie. those eightys radio controled cars…</p>
<p>I can’t link to Ben Patterson’s blog (“Circuit City R.I.P.” Look for Ben Patterson the gadget hound) but he points out very important things to psopel considerign hitting Circuit City’s liquidation sale
Often outside companies are brought in to run the liquidation sale, and also, often items that were not originally part of the company (in this case Circ City-- haha another “cc”)are brought it, with prices artifically marked up before being marked down. So these supposed “deals” really arent deals.</p>
<p>I think online stores contribute to CC death.</p>
<p>Online stores work for those people with patience, those that can deal with the shipping aspect, those that don’t need repairs, those that can translate specs to real-world performance and those that don’t return items very often.</p>
<p>There are a lot of people that like the convenience of a Radio Shack, CompUSA, Circuit City, BestBuy, etc. Unfortunately, there frequently isn’t room for a lot of these players in a given city.</p>
<p>Online stores probably do make an impact. I’m kind of an electronics nerd - I’m looking around my room right now and all the major electronics that I see were all purchased online, including my HDTV (it was at least $200 cheaper to buy online with a marked down price, no tax, and free shipping). But you have to be SURE you’re not going to return an item like that.</p>
<p>I’ve preferred Best Buy to Circuit City for some time now - most CC stores are dark and dingy, and the salespeople aren’t great. I went by one day to look at the HDTVs in person to see which one I liked best, and was ignored for a good 20 minutes when multiple salespeople were in the TV area. I don’t really like salespeople jumping all over you the second you walk in the door and ask “are you finding everything ok?” but I just thought that was a little strange. Maybe it was because they didn’t expect a young female to be seriously looking at HDTVs, but it was still weird.</p>
<p>At one time we had a Circuit City, Best Buy, CompUSA, The Good Guys, Tweeter, Radio Shack, Sears - all within a few miles of each other. Then a huge Frys went in and the business at these other stores dropped. The other stores then started going out of business (the Circuit City was closed in the last round of closures a few months ago and the Best Buy and Sears are still there). </p>
<p>The nice thing about Circuit City was that it was usually less expensive than Best Buy. But the nice thing about Frys is that they have both a large and more varied inventory and the prices are sometimes better (sometimes not).</p>
<p>But lately I’ve been buying smaller electronic items online - Amazon. The prices are usually the best, they have almost everything (either Amazon directly or one of the other vendors’ ‘stores’), and it magically just shows up within a week or so on my doorstep. I research things myself anyway and sales people at retail stores like the aforementioned usually don’t know much about the products anyway.</p>
<p>What surprises me is that Radio Shack is still in business. They’ve closed a bunch of stores but there are still some open. They have little stores with a poor selection of a strange selection of inventory for high prices.</p>
<p>I prefer to buy electronic items at the local stores because I like to see how they look and perform. However, it’s hard to resist online offer. Target, Wall Mart,… all offer online shopping now. The online price is cheaper than the local store price.</p>
<p>Is it me? I can’t stand Best Buy. It is usually impossible to find someone who actually KNOWS about the products. If you are trying to purchase anything with audio, you can’t hear at all…the place is like a big huge, high ceiling barn, and it’s very noisy all of the time. The only thing I’ve ever purchased at Best Buy is a cheap boom box…could have gotten it at Target. DH and I prefer to be able to HEAR our stereo, and TV equipment when we purchase them. Of course, we haven’t gotten a new one of each for a long time. I’m not sure what we will do when they need to be replaced. But it won’t be Best Buy. We miss Tweeter…yes it was way overpriced, but back in the day, the sales people were actually helpful AND they had those nice “testing rooms” where you could actually try different amps, receivers, speakers, etc.</p>
<p>I don’t like Best Buy but I have to use them because I usually don’t plan ahead in buying. They don’t have enough sale persons and the sale persons don’t know much about the products.</p>
<p>Sadly our nearest Circuit City is next to a Linens n Things that just closed. I don’t really buy electronics but my H seems to mainly go to Best Buy because they keep sending him coupons in the mail. I wonder why Circuit City never did that. We usually go to Radio Shack for obscure batteries and things that like. They also seem to be trying hard to get into the cell phone market.</p>
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<p>I live in a state without a sales tax so that’s not an attraction for me. I have three Apple laptops, two of them purchased at The Apple Store and one purchased online. I had to purchase one online as the model just came out and stores couldn’t keep them in stock. It probably took the same amount of time to acquire it as build time took a while. That’s about $7,000 in computer hardware. I like to use the physical Apple Store as they offer an unparalleled degree of service. Interestingly enough, their online store has a subpar customer service reputation.</p>
<p>There are lots of consumers out there with a want-it-now mentality or that need things for a project on their schedule where cost is a secondary consideration.</p>
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<p>I think that Amazon has cranked up price pressure a notch in 2008. I used to shop for textbooks at Barnes and Nobles for the membership discounts and coupons. Amazon in 2008 is matching or beating B&N’s membership prices with their everyday prices. B&N took a pretty good earnings hit last year and I wonder if Amazon’s more aggressive approach is taking share from other vendors.</p>
<p>A few weeks ago I ran into performance issues with my home desktop and the problem was disk space. I looked at online and in-store options and found that Best Buy had a great deal on the 1 TB Green MyBook and it supported USB 2.0, Firewire 400 (would have preferred 800) and eSATA. Furthermore, the disk has auto-turnoff when the computer is turned off. I drove over, picked it up, installed it and started moving my huge files over to the drive that evening and defragged and disk performance improved.</p>
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<p>Last week I set aside some time to get digital television working in our house. I bought my DTV converter at Radio Shack after finding that Target was out of stock. I spent some time with the box and determined that my old antenna was insufficient for DTV so I picked up an 80 inch antenna from Radio Shack. They were the only place within 20 miles that had antennas in-stock. All of the other stores sold them online. I picked up the model from Radio Shack and brought it home. It worked fine with a 25 foot cable but didn’t have the signal for the whole house.</p>
<p>Back to Radio Shack. I asked the person at the counter about the antenna amplifiers and he gave me some advice which I took. Brought it home, hooked it up and all is good.</p>
<p>Radio Shack sells a variety of services, some of which are high margin. They also sell a lot of parts which can be useful to hobbyists, do-it-yourselfers and those looking to repair their own electronics. Their stores are smaller and they can be located in areas not served by the larger stores. One really nice feature is that you can return things if they don’t work out. Certain classes of electronics work best with trial and error and the ability to return something conveniently is important.</p>