Comment on Empires fall
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 2 months agoCircuit 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).
Landless2029@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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.
booly@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
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).
ATDA@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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.
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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.