Once again “the earth” is supposedly synonymous with “that one country in North America”…
All three of these businesses were worldwide so fail.
Except for circuit City before some “akchually” guy corrects me, but it was still multinational (as in 2 nations to be exact).
Yeah, ToysRUs is alive and well in Canada. I have no idea that the bottom-right one is.
TigerDirect
It’s a Circuit City.
I bought my first PC’s parts all from TigerDirect’s website. Did a bunch of my research for it using their catalogue.
Nowadays I’m just happy to live an hour from a Microcenter.
TigerDirect eventually acquired the rights for the Circuit City name, years after the stores closed. They were great for awhile, it was just weird that they tried to revive the brand.
I bought my first PC parts at CompUSA, which… I don’t think I’ve seen for a very long time lol. Definitely used TigerDirect when I was in college though.
And TigerDirect also obtained the rights to the CompUSA name. That didn’t last long in the retail space either.
In my town, TigerDirect resurrected the actual physical defunct CompUSA location and reopened it, and then that location tanked again shortly thereafter.
Apropos of nothing, our long-abandoned Circuit City building is apparently finally being revamped into… An Aldi. For fuck’s sake.
TIL, thanks!
Circuit City
K Mart
Once again “the earth” is supposedly synonymous with “that one country in North America”…
they gave North American examples but the statement is universally true
It’s true. North America does in fact exist on planet earth.
You can blame BCG and shitty hedge funds for that
Wasn’t that Mitt Romney and Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury? (I forget his name.) But I remember him looking like a Bond villain.
you mean Munchkin?
I miss my frys electronics and their goofy buildings
At least microcenter will come to my hometown soon
My only complaint with microcenter is that the commission in incentives come off as extreme. Like I will be walking around with something in my hand and a rando will come up to me, say “hey there boss, lemme just slap this on that for you,” and proceed to put a sticker on it with their ID. Not a big deal, but palpable, and makes it harder to just browse.
Time to swap it out for an unlabeled one I guess 🤷
Nah, no hard feelings towards the retail folks, they’re doing what they’re supposed to. It’s just that I wish the corporate incentives were different so it felt more like the staff were trying to help.
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.
There’s still a Blockbuster sign up by the freeway near where I used to live. There wasn’t a Blockbuster there even when I moved there 10 years ago.
The giraffe still lives.
Empires bought by investment groups that fire all the employees, sell all the assets, and over leverage on too much debt till bankruptcy.
Portugal still has multiple very successful Toys R Us stores, most of them more than 20 years old at this point
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.
Circuit City was great until it wasn’t.
Sucks.
Why did Best Buy survive buy Circuit City went under? They were basically the same thing, so what did they do differently?
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.
I think it’s a Highlander scenario, there can only be one.
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.
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).
1 of the three was killed to make some hedge fund richer. Toys r us would not have died if it hadn’t been shorted in to oblivion.
I never understood circuit city. The local one ran prices 10-20% higher then best buy a few blocks over. You’d only ever go there when best buy ran out of dvd-r’s.
That being said whoever worked in their gaming section and kept updating the demo kiosk with every game now labeled a “hidden gem”… Props because those were always fresh picks.
Odd, it was the other way around where I lived. CC had the best prices while BB was overpriced, and like you said, CC’s gaming section was great.
Some empires that ought to fall… google, facebook, microsoft
You expect nothing to take their place?
…or nothing to be left
Oh certainly i expect it. But before something takes their place, would at least give a small window of hope before the replacement establishes a solid footing. We can at least know what to expect.
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 🤷♂️
