When Circuit City announced that it was closing all of its stores it showed the true signs of the economy. Circuit City was a massive corporation employing over 30,000 employees which would all be without work within a few weeks time.
Have you ever wondered what its like to be on the inside and try to work a liquidation sale? Its not an opportunity (an unfortunate one at that) many get to experience; in this case the complete downfall of Circuit City.
The entire write up can be read here but copied below are some of the better excerpts that show the true face of the corporate technology world as well as humanity at its finest.
"Being an active member of the Circuit City Associate Forum community, an online message board which Circuit City associates could post to using their employee logins, I constantly read through the things which get posted within the forums. On January 9th I remember hitting that F5 button to refresh the page and reading the news that announced the company"s intention to sell itself. I was the first to find out at my location and broke the news to the managers and supervisors, we stood in silence for a moment around our firedog counter in shock and then began to wonder what to do. Our future was an uncertainty.
On January 16th we all woke up and went to work. We didn"t expect the speed of the judgment, at about 10:22am a TV in the break room had been tuned to CNBC and were reporting their breaking news about Circuit City beginning the liquidation process and closing its stores nationwide. Four of us watched the announcement; thirty-four thousand associates were now going to become a part of the unemployment statistic. Corporate made an official announcement to our associates 20 minutes after that news segment.
On the day the liquidation was announced a few employees spent most of the day crying, these were mostly people who had worked there for most of their adult life."
"But these past 2/3 weeks have been CRAZY. We lost our manager a few weeks ago because he needed to be closer to home because of his kid on the way. We then got a new manager who JUST left a few days ago. We"ve since got some new guy who I"ve only met once....couldn"t even tell you his name. Keeping track of who"s in charge has been hell."
"While we all try to make the best of a terrible situation, some customers are there to send us back to careless land. 90% of all customers that walk into the store approach me and ask when they"ll be having "all the good deals" to which I always say "I HAVE NO FRIGGIN IDEA". Circuit City did not exist anymore. The liquidators were in control of the prices and we had no control of anything. We don"t even know when they were going to lower the prices. It"s for this reason most of us have hid some type of item we"ve been eying throughout the store so we can buy them later when the prices are lower (haha). We"ve already had the cops over a few times and I expect them to keep visiting due to the continuation of violent shoppers with nasty attitudes."
"There was a lot of stolen stuff from the store. Mostly empty game cases and the biggest section with loss was..... Spanish music. I would find tons of CD cases just open with nothing in them."
"I looked in a shelving unit to see if anyone had stashed anything for the final days ( we searched the entire store and found tons of stuff. Lucky for the people who came the next morning to find GTA IV for $2). I had found an entire stash of acc. such as remotes and instructions for iPod docks and various stereos, including an Apple product with the remote and every dock adapter made. So logically I ask my manager what do do with all this stuff. "Trash it." Well can I have the iPod thing? "No, trash it." Awesome. So i proceed to throw away all this stuff."