CIRCUIT BREAKER: The Final Days of Circuit City!

CIRCUIT BREAKER: The Final Days of Circuit City!
By Louis Fowler

Last Sunday, the Circuit City in Fort Collins closed down for good. It's just one of over 500 US Circuit City stores to vacate the premises, and I can honestly say that it's been a long time coming.

I have a great consumer past with Circuit City: I bought my first cassette player there, I bought my first CD player there, and I bought my first DVD player there. While Best Buy has always been my first choice for CDs and DVDs, when it came to electronics at great prices, City was actually a decent place to make a purchase. They always stuck to their promises and lived up to their service plans. But these memories were from over five years ago. Times have most definitely a-changed.

In Oklahoma City, up until the time I left in 200-something, Circuit City never carried media. It was strictly electronics and, having since switched completely to Best Buy around then, as I had all the electronic accoutrements I needed, really never had a reason to go there. Best Buy has done their damnedest to beat, or at least match, Circuit City's prices; they go out of their way to make them your first choice in consumer electronics. Why go to Circuit City when Best Buy has gone out of their way to accommodate me?

But, even so, it was only about three years ago when I did start going back to Circuit City, mostly because I started to take notice of the spectacular DVD deals advertised in their Sunday circular. They were, if I'm not mistaken, the first of the superstores to break the $3.99 DVD barrier, selling the “unspecial” editions of movies, DVDs that would eventually be re-released months later with scads of features. I had no problem with this, as sometimes I just wanted the movie; problem was that when you actually went into Circuit City to pick up a couple of these deals—that Sunday, no less—they would always be “out of stock” or “on back order”. The first couple of times I chalked it up to low stock, but by the fifth time, I knew that it was a regular thing. I talked to other customers and people in online forums, only to learn that my problem wasn't out of the ordinary.



To rub salt in the wound, Circuit City, unlike Best Buy, doesn't offer rain-checks and I only found that information out after being dealt with by the worst employees outside of a ghetto mall’s Sbarro's. While Best Buy actually seemed to educate their employees on new products, release dates and the like, Circuit City seemed to hire from only the best alternative high-school job fairs, employing the laziest, most careless teens available. When I asked about the rain-check, the young man with the Serj Tankian beard didn't know what a rain-check was, so he called his supervisor. His supervisor didn't know, so he called a manager. The manager didn't know, so he called a general manager. It was a spot-on real-life reenactment of that MR. SHOW skit about the guy who needs change. (And, no, they didn’t offer rain-checks.)

Besides being unknowledgeable, Circuit City employees committed, to me, an even greater sin: outright laziness. At Best Buy, when they check the computer and it says they have a title in stock but it's not on the floor, they always say “It may be in the back, or on the truck. Let me go look.” Now whether they do actually go look is something else altogether, but at least they offer, go back to some room behind an “Employees Only” door and disappear for a few minutes. I appreciate that. I appreciate them giving me al least the impression that they cared.

Circuit City employees, on the other hand, would simply say “It's not back there.” or, when you ask them to check, sigh extra-loudly. Thanks for the help, Chad! Sorry to take you away from hitting on the sorority chick who wants to “maybe” buy a copy of 13 GOING ON 30 and case of Fire Dog energy drink. (Oh yes, Fire Dog had their own energy drink. Obviously the employees weren't drinking it.)



For the last year, with the exception of maybe stopping in for a few minutes just to look around, I really avoided buying anything there. And, as far as those low-price CDs and DVDs go, well, Best Buy offers price matching, so knowing that Circuit City wouldn't have what I was carrying anyway, I just took the circular over to the Best Buy customer service desk and got the product—which was in-stock, by the way—for the lower price. I foiled you again, Circuit City!

In retrospect, I had seen Circuit City in such a maddening decline for so long, that it's no surprise that they are over and out. And you know what? They deserve it. Circuit City deserves to be a dead business and its employees deserve to be standing in the bread lines. This is what Circuit City gets; they have been coasting for so long, treating customers with sheer indifference and bait-n-switching at every opportunity, it's no wonder consumers have made Best Buy their sole entertainment store. I know I have. Circuit City should be held up as a model for how to totally demolish your customer base in one fail swoop.

So that brings me to the past few weeks. As they attempted to liquidate their entire stock, curious media-vultures such as I made numerous trips to pick the Circuit City carcass clean. Every time you went in, the prices dipped lower and lower—games, CDs and DVDs started at 30% off and ended, with what was left, at 90%. And I, admittedly, made out like a bandit. With about $100-200 of merch in my basket each visit, I walked out happily paying maybe $20-30 for all the booty. I got games I had wanted, DVDs that had eluded me and CDs that I forgot about. Their loss was most definitely my gain.

Last Sunday was that last day of business. All the remaining merchandise had been moved up front in a very small area. Funny enough, the remaining CDs and DVDs—90% off—consisted mostly of "black" entertainment (hundreds of copies of the new Mary J. Blige, too many editions of GIRLFRIENDS Season 2 and handfuls of Spike Lee's SCHOOL DAZE) and WWE box-sets with names like WWE INTIMIDATION 2007, or something to that effect. I had long purged the store and, walking out empty-handed, turned this final trip into a bittersweet goodbye. Sure, I could have bought a USB cable for 49 cents, or a mouse-pad covered with dolphins for roughly the same price, but Circuit City had enough of my money. They're dead and buried and you know what? Good riddance. You really should have checked that stock-room, Chad.



But, hey Best Buy: just because you’re the only guy in town, don’t think I’ll take the same treatment. I’ve been ordering more and more from Amazon lately…