Once again “the earth” is supposedly synonymous with “that one country in North America”…
It’s true. North America does in fact exist on planet earth.
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.
Circuit City
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!
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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
Lemmy users any time someone references anything American
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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.
Some empires that ought to fall… google, facebook, microsoft
You expect nothing to take their place?
What the hell will take their place? Another Soviet Union?
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.
…or nothing to be left
There was always a certain ambiance in Circuit City that I found to be appealing. At least on my local one before it closed down. It was like the lights were dimmed way down, but it was still bright enough to see. I guess you would call that “cool temperature” lighting, which is definitely not fashionable anymore. Everything nowadays seems to follow Apple’s store design which is this sterile eggshell white, bathed in neutral or warm temperature lighting. I find it kind of boring, but I understand why they do it that way.
Plus, I loved how instantly recognizable their old stores were. The big red block turned at an angle for an entrance was brilliant imo. They used it a lot in their television commercials and made it look like a plug end or a battery coming down from the sky.
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.
The giraffe still lives.
This is why I’m so angry that billionaires managed to convince people there are companies that are “too big to fail”.
Our tax dollars have been used to prop up private companies.
Yet it couldn’t save toys r us?
Yet it couldn’t save toys r us?
Nope. Because Toys R Us was murdered by an investment firm.
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Of course, some months later as fall approached, travellers saw stretched between the ruined pillars a banner proclaiming: Spirit Halloween Now Hiring!
It is the end of everything.
Great, now I’ve got to go watch “The Ballard of Buster Scruggs” again
Portugal still has multiple very successful Toys R Us stores, most of them more than 20 years old at this point
Empires bought by investment groups that fire all the employees, sell all the assets, and over leverage on too much debt till bankruptcy.
RIP Fry’s.
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.
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).
Worked there in the mid '00s and oh my God did they never shut the fuck up about selling those same 5 phones and plans ugh.
I wanted to work in an OG RadioShack not a shack with shitty radios.
Especially Samsung, and especially Samsung appliances.
Samsung’s appliance division would probably be completely dead to consumers by now if it weren’t for the fact that they bribe Best Buy to put their stuff front and center in the showroom.
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
I think it’s a Highlander scenario, there can only be one.
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.
pour one down for Fry’s
