Circuit City Is Toast
I do feel bad for the employees who are now out of work. But when I take a step back and observe my own shopping habits, this isn’t much of a surprise. Over the past few years I’ve found myself hitting Fry’s, Best Buy, and the Apple Store more and more, and avoiding Circuit City and CompUSA in particular. Amazon also gets a surprising amount of my consumer electronics business as well. And this is particularly silly because there’s a Circuit City about a mile from me, while I have to trek down to Palo Alto to hit Fry’s.
The most egregious offense is unfair prices. I’m still pissed from when I went to Circuit City to buy a DVD player and the saleman sold me a close-to-$100 Monster HDMI cable. I’ve since learned my lesson and recently bought some cheap-ass sub $5 HDMI cables from Amazon. They work just fine.
Second is selection. Circuit City and CompUSA always seemed to have a subset of the stuff that was available at the others. At this point, when I want Apple stuff I hit the Apple Store, and Fry’s is the absolute best for tons of tech stuff in one place. Then there’s online, where just about anything imaginable is available at a great price.
Then there’s customer service. I’m always annoyed when I am being rung up and the salesperson (usually some kid who would be better off working at Jamba Juice) inserts the extended warranty or the store card or some other plan that is totally unwanted. I never buy that stuff and therefore must say “no” three or four times. Believe it or not, this can be a deterrent, particularly when I just want to buy one thing like a $5 HDMI cable. At the Apple Stores, sometimes a salesperson will mention Apple Care but they drop it after the first mention — they don’t push it.
The customer service at the Apple Stores is tops. I popped in there last weekend to get my iPhone checked out. I made a Genius Bar appointment online. They tell you when to show up. When I got to the store, one of the employees checked me in. I waited about 10 minutes and then got hands-on attention. It’s more like checking into a hotel than anything else. And the key positive of talking with an Apple Genius is their calm, collected demeanor, which certainly comes in handy when talking to people with problems. They don’t make you feel like an idiot who can’t use technology. I also had a very positive experience getting my MacBook hard drive repaired.
Compare this to the time several years ago when I returned an Iomega Zip drive to Circuit City because it had the “click of death.” I won’t go too much into it except to say it was more like an interrogation where possibly I screwed up the drive myself. It felt like a struggle to get it exchanged for a new one.
All of the above seems to be common-sense stuff from the customer’s point of view, that was forgotten by CompUSA and Circuit City: provide a good selection at fair prices and don’t skimp on the customer service. Circuit City failed at all of the above and therefore, I’m not surprised they failed as a company.
I worked at Circuit City in Cincinnati, Ohio for over a year until this past August. I too am unsurprised by their collapse, and neither are any of my ex-coworkers. That company is basically a textbook example of mismanagement at the corporate level. They made plenty of brilliant moves like laying off all their experienced employees and hiring new workers for less money, just so they could give themselves a pay raise.
I can identify with your complaints over CC employees being overly-pushy with service contracts. When I worked there I was constantly arguing with my managers that as a customer, I wouldn’t want people forcing this stuff on me, or hounding me the minute I walked in the door, so chances are most of the people who came into our store wouldn’t like that either. I realize that the managers were just doing their job by pushing the corporate policy, but it didn’t take a genius to see that this strategy wasn’t going to help anything.
Circuit City’s demise has been expected for awhile. I feel badly for the people I know who are now out of work, but the company as a whole got what it deserved. Although I wish this didn’t mean that Best Buy is now my only local source for electronics around here.