I always felt the staff at Circuit City were too aggressive. I know it’s like that at a lot of places (don’t dare go to furniture stores these days), but the CC people were big on the hard sell and that’s why I haven’t shopped there in ages. (oh, and the huge hard sell on the extended warranty for everything didn’t help either).
Best Buy was (is?) terrible on the extended warranties. I bought a computer there for a friend once, it took me an hour to get out of there. When I refused the extended warranties from the salesman, then I had to go though another round with his manager. The manager pursued me to the cash register, and the cashier tried to get me to buy the warranty too.
They must really threaten those employees to sell extended warranties, but my only thought was that I wouldn’t be buying a computer there again.
That doesn’t seem so bad to me. All they’re doing is establishing a floor for your earnings over a given month, and establishing a floor for your take-home pay over a given week. As long as they don’t withhold current high earnings to pay for expected future slow weeks, I can’t see the downside. It’s like getting a free $100 loan for two weeks.
I’ve been in 4 different Circuit City stores and every one of them has a funky BO/wet dog smell. It must be some chemical in the carpeting. Not saying that’s why they’re going under, but maybe it helped push them in that direction.
Also CC’s and BB’s prices and selection suck compared to Amazon and New Egg.
What is the deal with the extended warranties? Obviously they are hugely profitable for the vendor or they wouldn’t be in such a tither to sell them. Very profitable for them means very unprofitable for me in most cases.
I had almost forgotten about Divx. It’s amazing this crap store has lasted as long as it has. Their stores always look dingy and sloppy too.
Since I am an hourly , full-time retail employee with benefits, making a higher-than-minimum wage, I could not in good conscience set foot in a store that had so blatantly gotten rid of all the employees they had to pay benefits for. And apparently I was not alone. They did it in such a high-profile manner, hoping it would make them look fiscally smart. But they forgot who their customers were.
I vowed never to go to Circuit City again, when three different times I wanted to purchase something advertised on the floor was not in stock. When I can go to Best Buy and get the same thing I want, what’s the point of going to Circuit City? One of the Circuit Citys (Cities?) is being closed down near where I work. I went over there to see if there were any good deals. Even with the sales, the prices were still higher than Best Buy and Target.
I think most of their money went into those 100 yard long receipts.
And Best Buy’s employees (in the loosest sense of the word) aren’t any better.
My local store has the bizarre behavior of not using any of their registers, ever. They ring people up at the customer-service desk, which works ok sometimes, but if someone has something they need actual customer service for, like a return, they line will back-up halfway across the store. I guess it means they can hire one or two less people.
I even asked them about the front set of checkout counters. “Oh, they are only used for Black Friday.” Crazy.
No flyer in my sunday paper this week. There was one last week, which surprised me. After the Xmas season, the whole thing is going to fold up.
[Mr. Praline]
This company is no more. It has ceased to be.
[/Mr. Praline]
I don’t know how any brick and mortar electronics stores are surviving. You can find anything cheaper from online vendors even when you include the shipping.
When I was in the market for a new LCD TV, I found what I wanted online and the lowest price with shipping. Then I went to the nearest Circuit City. I asked the salesman if he could match the price I could get it for online, including shipping. No, he couldn’t. Would he throw in some cables to make it worth my while to buy from him? No, he wouldn’t. I asked him how places like this can compete with that attitude. He told me that Circuit City was doing “just fine.”
A few weeks later I heard the news report of the sales staff firings. Now they are filing for bankruptcy.
In my opinion, you’d have to be childishly impatient or have money to burn to buy from your local CC or Best Buy. Order online and someone will bring the exact same product with the exact same manufacturer’s warranty right to your front door for less money.
My local CC does this, too. Weird. :dubious:
They still have a lot of the bits and pieces that Radio Shack used to have. Here in Ontario, Radio Shack became “The Source by Circuit City” (the Circuit City part is smaller). In addition to selling electronics, they used to carry parts. So if you’re building your own radio, you can still get a speaker cone without buying a speaker or stereo. You could buy switches, jacks, cables etc. I would shop at Best Buy if I was thinking of buying a stereo, but I would browse at Radio Shack (er “The Source”) when I’m trying to repair a stereo I’ve had since the early 1980s, or build a new one. If you’d asked me two years ago, I would have said The Source and Best Buy were two very different animals and not really in competition.
But when I was recently looking for electronic parts, I was amazed at how very little The Source now has. It’s like they dumped all their parts and replaced them with cellphone and iPod accessories. I needed to repair a microphone and Radio Shack used to carry the parts, but this time I could only find accessories for components, not parts. So I was SOL for rewiring my little project.
Missed the edit window. The Source used to have parts the way Radio Shack had. When the local Radio Shack’s became The Source, they were still Radio Shacks. For example, some of the posts here have mentioned “white goods” (refrigerators etc.) Never would see something like that at “The Source” anymore than I’d expect to see it at Radio Shack.
I think there’s still a place for the bricks and mortar stores in the consumer electronics business. These are not commodity products to the extent that is most of the stuff you’d buy from Amazon.com. You still need to look at this stuff in person before deciding.
Not to mention the occasional desire to buy something and take it home and use it that day.
was just at the closing CC in spring hill TN. I was price shopping for a 500gb WD usb external hard drive. with the 30% off store closing markdown the drive was around $128, walmart had the exact same drive for 99.85, and office max had it for $108. i can see a couple buck price diffrence… but the original CC price would have been almost 160… thats crazy.
That’s mainly because closing sales are not real anymore. In general, not just for CC. They know people think they’ll get deals, so they raise prices back to full retail, and then give a set percentage off. And the beauty for them is that stuff that still doesn’t sell at 30% doesn’t go to 50% or 70% off. It just gets shipped to other stores in the chain that are still open, or to liquidators.
The only real deals are on floor models, and on the actual store hardware like shelving.
Exactly. My 9 year old TV died last night, so we talked to my daughter’s ex-bf who works at a CC near us (until mid-December when it closes, that is.) He said that they jacked up all the prices before putting in the supposed discounts, so the
TVs were not good deals. I heard someone say the same thing about Mervyn’s, which is also closing.
I knew furniture stores took the discount off the MSRP rather than normal sales price, but I wasn’t aware that the closing CCs would be doing it too. Sneaky bastards.
Wonder how that affects new video games and hardware which seem to sell for the same price everywhere? Maybe there’s some deals to be had there on controllers and whatnot.