In yet another blow to the economy, Circuit City filed chapter 11 today. I guess it's partly my fault for not shopping there enough, but they just didn't have good enough prices and they were more inconveniently located than Best Buy or any online retailers. That and they had no qualified employees, having laid off their longest tenured employees in favor of minimum wage newbies. I'm pretty sure I remember Jessie predicting this would come back to bite them long ago, but I'm too lazy to go searching through the archives to find it. I hope that other retailers learn the lesson that laying off your best employees isn't the way to turn around a struggling business. Especially since cutting an executive job or two would have saved as much or more.
Still, Circuit City is planning on closing 155 of it's 700 stores and laying off up to 7,300 employees. On top of all of the people in the mortgage/banking industry who have lost their jobs, it's going to be a lean Christmas for retailers. And since CompUSA just closed their doors about a year ago, I'm beginning to wonder if online retailers are simply driving brick and mortar shops out of business. Fry's and Best Buy seem to be thriving though, so I'm not sure that the others weren't just poorly managed.
Well, I'm pretty sure I had some other good points to make but got distracted and don't remember what they were anymore. I need an assistant.
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