Welllll, If anyone reading is as old as me, they will remember the time a few years back when CC and BB were neck and neck in volume around the $9-10 billion range. Now, with BB over 4 times the size it is interesting to second guess what happened. Clearly it is much more than the fairly recent (07') change in commissioned sales people to hourly. Circuit has ALWAYS had a much more stodgy, sterile brand positioning than BB. They just have never appeared to be fun or cool or happening. They also pretty regularly abdicated a business when they couldn't figure it out thus reducing traffic (and cross traffic) and making people go elsewhere (BB, Wal-Mart) when they couldn’t find what they wanted at Circuit. They got out of the CD, DVD software business when they couldn’t figure out how to make margin there (and pre-downloads this was the main traffic source for CE retail and MADE BB for a long time. Movie and music media bring traffic and is a much more fun business than hardware. It represents celebrity and passion. Its all about the movies and music). They got out of the appliance business when they couldn’t figure that one out. They basically fed BB the business they didn’t want or couldn’t hack. The salesperson transition was just another bad decision in a long line of them.
This is exactly what happened to the Good Guys. Every time they couldn’t figure out how to make exorbitant margins in a category, they got out of it. Video game software, entry level prices points, computers, on and on. You would go in and ask for something and they would literally send you to BB to get it. Once you went to BB and saw they have the entry level CD player for $39 that you wanted to buy for your kids room or a gift and saw they also had the $299 one that you wanted when yours broke, why would you go back to the Good Guys, ever? Retail isn’t rocket science but you would think so with so many bad executions out there.
The irony is that the market is HUNGRY for a good, solid competitor to BB. I hope my friends at BB forgive me, but the experience is not so terrific there. In an effort to compete with Wal-Mart they have really downscaled the experience. You can't find more than a handful of aisles with more than a little tiny 1" by 2" tag with no more than a price and a model number. If you haven't already spent hours online figuring out what you want, the store selling environment will clearly not help you. What happened to the days of experiential selling? Look at Apple. While they have a much smaller assortment and granted Apple products are hot in and of themselves, their stores are cool (or as the younger folk say, "tight"). Can you imagine an Apple-like store with all of the gear of a BB? Wow, I would go there. Target sells a
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