I actually worked at the second to last block busters. It was sad like having a job inside a dying person. Every month it was a new gimmick to get people back. But still fewer and fewer people showed up. You could feel the end coming.
Circuit City was great until it wasn’t.
Sucks.
K-Mart needs to be added to this
Stahp I just watched a 2-hour video analysis of liminal spaces, I can only get so hauntological.
That’s the Chula Vista toys r us and the San Diego Fry’s. Right?
That’s a circuit city, not a fry’s
The way these buildings were built tell you they weren’t intended to be around for long. Four cinder block walls and a flat metal roof. Cheap to put up, easy to tear down
These buildings have generally been around for longer than the companies that moved in and then went bankrupt 🤷♂️
That graphic in the second link, holy shit
“Let me put it this way. A corporation is like a big, hungry monster. My job is to find plenty of smaller, weaker monsters for it to eat.”
Yeah, pretty sad to see. Shopping at all the different department stores was pretty cool back then. But now it’s all Macy’s.
Unregulated capitalism destroys everything it touches, including itself.
Why did Best Buy survive buy Circuit City went under? They were basically the same thing, so what did they do differently?
Circuit City’s management made several consecutive catastrophic fuckups which ultimately led to the company’s demise. The most widely publicized one was firing all of their experienced staff and attempting to backfill all of those positions with minimum wage newbies. This obviously backfired spectacularly.
They also dropped a stable, profitable high-margin product category (appliances) to focus on an unstable, low-margin category instead (TV’s and personal electronics).
They also invested heavily into selling loads of televisions. They stocked up on TVs for the holiday season using purchase orders (basically using an IOU to pay back later), but when they were stuck with all thier unsold stock they folded since they couldn’t pay those bills.
Oh and Best Buy owes its survival to investing heavily into cell phone plans and contracts. They would’ve folded without it.
Even now they get lots of company kickbacks from Sony, Samsung, Apple, Sonos, etc to be a showroom for stuff.
Oh and Best Buy owes its survival to investing heavily into cell phone plans and contracts. They would’ve folded without it.
Radio Shack limped along for maybe a decade after their core business stopped making sense, because of their cell phone deals. This Onion article from 2007 captures the cultural place that RadioShack operated in at the time, and they didn’t file bankruptcy until 2015 (and then reorganized and filed bankruptcy again in 2017).
I think it’s a Highlander scenario, there can only be one.
Circuit City blew all their money trying to create a disposable DVD called Divx. It was intended to replace video rental stores.
Oh that was wild too, those color changing DVDs.
You are probably referring to FlexPlay, a completely different implementation of the same basic idea.
Might be. I remember them being marketed as “no return rentals”
Yeah. The DIVX discs mentioned here need a special player
As someone that shopped at both, but preferred Circuit City, I think Best Buy initially did a better job of “wowing” customers and had a better store layout. They also were better at trying to squeeze money out of people and thus were more profitable than Circuit City, so when times got leaner they survived and then had the whole market.
Like the Pizza Hut turned Bank turned Chinese Food Restaurant turned Fed Ex Pack and Ship
Turned back to pizza hut in a few instances
Look upon my works and despair.
There is a Toys R Us a few blocks away from me that I used to go to as a kid and it’s wild to me that only in the last year has anything been done to it and all that was done is someone erected a chain link fence around the property to keep people out because it was pretty popular for hooking up and selling drugs given in its in a sparsely populated area and has absolutely no lights around. Like it still has the sign and shit, the building has just sat completely abandoned for over a decade since TRU went bankrupt.
We had Blockbusters and Circuit City and even a Mervyn’s here. The buildings have all been re-used though. Just the TRU and the Orchard Supply next to it have sat unchanged over the years, like ruined relics of the past.
Portugal still has multiple very successful Toys R Us stores, most of them more than 20 years old at this point
A reminder that two of those three didn’t fall, they were killed by vulture capital
There was a Wisconsin retail chain, Shopko, that fell to this, too. They bought the company, then took out loans against all the properties. Those loans were paid out as bonuses to the board, but the company had to pay the bill.
Then they minimally staffed the stores. One person handling registers, one or two behind the customer service counter, and one or two people on the floor to handle stocking and helping customers. If you needed help, you could easily be waiting around 15 minutes for anyone to come. This for a store that, while not as big as a Super Walmart, is around the size of a regular Walmart.
During the inevitable bankruptcy, it was revealed that the money taken at the register for state sales taxes was pocketed by the company rather than paid to the state.
All under the guise of “brick and mortar can’t compete with Amazon”. Competition was not the problem. Shopko was murdered by its own board of directors.
I still won’t forgive Shopko for consuming Pamida and ultimately taking the remnants of Pamida down with it.
I’m surprised to see on Wikipedia that Shopko actually owned Pamida basically the entire time I was growing up, they just ran it independently. They even broke up breifly before re-merging later. The second merger sent it all to shit, though. “Shopko Hometown” my ass.
Private equity spent most of the 90’s destroying Montgomery Ward and Eddie Lampert held Sears/KMart under the water until the bubbles stopped so he could cry to anyone that would listen that the retail business was failing while he made a fortune selling off the company’s real estate.
Yup, they deliberately ran it into the ground. They took out loans against Kmart to buy Sears and sold Sears and Kmart properties off to give themselves money via stock buybacks.
And what’s worse, because it worked, you can see similar actions happening to other major retail outlets. Target, in particular, seems to be following directly in the footsteps of Kmart.
“Fun” fact: Bain Capital killed both TRU and KayBee Toys.
Look up on my works ye mighty and despair
