Among the reasons Circuit City failed . . .

[xiphias]

So, as you know, because of Circuit City's clever idea to turn their company around by firing all their best salespeople and keeping all their worst ones, they are going out of business.

A couple days ago, I decided it was time to make like a buzzard and see what I could get at their "going out of business" sales. I was looking for a 17-inch flat screen LCD monitor.

Their "Going Out Of Business" price, deeply discounted from their regular price, was $179.

Both Costco and MicroCenter are selling a comparable model for $139, minus a $30 rebate, for $99.

I suspect that this is ANOTHER reason Circuit City is going out of business. When your Going Out Of Business price is kinda close to twice what other retailers are offering, meaning that your Not Going Out Of Business price must have been MORE than twice, it's probably a bad strategy.

Comments

[brooksmoses]

Yeah, I'd heard someone else commenting on that, too. They really seem to have had problems with this concept of having business sense, in general.

(Meanwhile, "selling a comparable model for $139, minus a $30 rebate, for $99" has its own problems, since $139-$30=$109. :) )

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Er. Yeah. $129.

[ckd]

That's pretty standard for liquidation sales, though. The liquidators immediately mark everything back up to the "regular" price (that nobody's paid in months), then start discounting from that.

Remember Lechmere? The day before their liquidation sale, I was in the Cambridge store. There was a big stack of boom boxes for $90, marked down from $110. Nobody was buying them.

The first day of the sale, they were 10% off of $110 (so $99); they were flying out the door. Great deal!

[dillonpuff.livejournal.com]

SOP for liquidation sales - jack prices up and slowly cut prices. it's very rare that you get an actual deal ... most of the stock clears out before the prices drop below what you'd pay by shopping around.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was briefly attracted by an ad for Circuit City's liquidation sale - until I noticed that prices were "up to 30% off."

Not much of a sale.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's the liquidation company. The one handling Circuit City is well-known for doing that-- they swoop in, mark everything up, mark it back down to more than the original price, and hope suckers will just look at the big percent sign and not pay too much attention to the numbers.

www.consumerist.com has a lot about this...

A bigger problem for Circuit City was that a year or so ago they decided they were paying their sales staff too much and fired everyone over a certain pay grade. This means that they'd just nuked their whole knowledgable sales staff and replaced them with the clueless or inexperienced. Oops. (Which you noted above, yeppo. The liquidation company is the problem, though. Mostly Circuit City's prices were comparable to Best Buy and so on, depending on what was on sale where.)

[voltbang.livejournal.com]

I went in the other day and they had a lens that was semi-interesting to me. So I got on one of their computers and did a price check at adorama.com and after their 30% off sale, they were about $10 under adorama, which doesn't sound like a big deal, but my local camera store can't beat adoramas price even on their big highly publicized only sale of the year. I still didn't buy it, seeing it for a low price helped me decide though.

[gilmoure.livejournal.com]

Yup. Same thing when CompUSA went out of business.

HP 17" LCD Monitor

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Well, *I* didn't know. So wait, Best Buy, Circuit City and CompUSA are all out of business?

Makes me wonder what else will be different by the time I move back to the USA...

[ron_newman]

Best Buy is still very much in business. They are the survivor.