Circuit City

» see circuitcity.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Circuit city closed in 2009 with 567 stores in the united states. I never set foot in one. The chain did not operate in turkey, and by the time amazon and digital cameras had crossed the boğaziçi the brand was already gone. The closest turkish equivalent at the format level was teknosa, which is still operating in 2026 as part of the sabanci group.

The company started in 1949 in richmond, virginia, as wards company, selling television sets out of a single storefront. Samuel wurtzel founded it. The rebrand to circuit city happened in 1984 once the chain had figured out the suburban big-box format. Through the 80s and 90s it grew to 567 stores and around 60,000 employees at peak. For most of that period it was the largest us consumer-electronics chain ahead of best buy.

The company filed chapter 11 on november 10 2008. Great american group ran the liquidation auctions over the winter. On january 16 2009 the company gave up looking for a buyer and announced full wind-down. The last stores closed on march 8 2009 with around 30,000 employees laid off in the final round.

~ the dossier ~

~ the firing decision ~

In march 2007 management announced a "wage management initiative" that fired about 3,400 of the highest-paid floor associates. The official reasoning was that they were earning too far above the market rate for their roles, with those positions then refilled at lower starting wages. The washington post ran the story two weeks later under a headline that the move "appeared to be backfiring." Sales numbers backed that read. The customers who actually knew the inventory had been the reason returning buyers walked into the store rather than the best buy down the road.

~ the funny part ~

By the time circuit city filed chapter 11 in november 2008, "highest-paid sales associate gets fired for being good at the job" was already a standard business-school case study about wage-floor accounting blind spots. The chain had also missed the apple-store hardware-presentation shift and never adopted the geek-squad service tier that helped best buy hold its margin in the same period. Real estate leases priced for a different decade sat underneath all of it.

~ what got buried with it ~

Circuitcity.com was acquired out of bankruptcy by systemax and run as an online-only store for a couple of years before the brand was dropped in 2012. Tigerdirect, the same systemax subsidiary that absorbed compusa, ended up holding both circuit city's and compusa's domain redirects. By 2015 even the redirects were gone. For the us electronics-retail category the practical inheritor was best buy, which had no real big-box competitor in most metros after the march 2009 liquidation finished.

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