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It's fairly simple.  Best Buy stores are nicer and cheaper than Circuit City stores.  Circuit City is the Dominos to Best Buy's Pizza Hut -- reliably discovering new degrees of awful vs. hardly five-star but at least consistent.  The stores are filthy.  The company chooses terrible locations.  (If you want a big-box retailer on the outskirts of town, the company's name had damned well better be either Wal-Mart or Target, or your competitors are going to rip your face off.)  Find me a product from Circuit City, and there's a better-than-decent chance that I can find it at CostCo, and I'll find it cheaper and sold to me by someone who doesn't give me a fucking attitude throughout the process.

This has nothing to do with pay and everything to do with idiocy.  The CostCo employee is (now) making a lot more than the Circuit City employee, and with benefits, as I understand it, yet CostCo still manages to compete well enough against a much larger adversary (Wal-Mart), while Circuit City has its clock cleaned.

Neither one carries Mac stuff, so fuck'em both.  I'm limited to CompUSA in the big-box electronics market.

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.

by Drew J Jones (pedobear@pennstatefootball.com) on Thu Apr 5th, 2007 at 12:27:13 AM EST
This has nothing to do with pay and everything to do with idiocy.

The only way I can interpret that comment is to guess that you have in mind what redstar noted above, namely that Best Buy "restructures" too, so that both chains are equally brutal with their workforces.

But I do agree with you that Circuit City stores usually come across as seedy, and that that might have something to do with their present difficulties. Nevertheless, I have found on two occasions Circuit City to have specific products not available at other local stores, so that I ended up buying from them.

And I don't think the use of profanity is justified just because a retailer doesn't carry "Mac stuff". That kind of attitude might have made sense in 1984 (my first computer was a Mac Plus), but it doesn't today. Today, the rational platform to use is Linux, and any big box store will carry plenty of hardware for that.

A bomb, H bomb, Minuteman / The names get more attractive / The decisions are made by NATO / The press call it British opinion -- The Three Johns

by Alexander on Thu Apr 5th, 2007 at 02:36:15 AM EST
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The only way I can interpret that comment is to guess that you have in mind what redstar noted above, namely that Best Buy "restructures" too, so that both chains are equally brutal with their workforces.

Whether Best Buy is also "brutal," -- they're only going to pay what they can get away with paying, since it's a business rather than a charity -- I don't know, but part of the reason for why I mentioned CostCo was to illustrate the point that a store doesn't have to pay low wages and provide no benefits in order to compete.  CostCo is quite profitable.

Circuit City coming across as seedy most certainly has something to do with the company's present difficulties.  If your stores look like trash dumps, and your employees and managers are all rude or clueless or both, it doesn't tend to go far with customers.

As for Linux is concerned, I have no idea as to which platform is the more rational to use.  (What criteria are we using to determine rational choice?)  I'm sure Linux is great, but, as someone who is -- shall we say -- less-than-brilliant with computers, I don't bother with it.  And I don't quite follow the offense taken at what I thought was a fairly benign use of profanity.

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.

by Drew J Jones (pedobear@pennstatefootball.com) on Fri Apr 6th, 2007 at 05:19:54 PM EST
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