ceguy

Circuit City: Simply Appalling

Actually, CC has been going down for over a decade. They have long leases in poor locations, no program to bring new customers into their stores, an incompetent marketing department (and now no senior marketing person), a senior executive running the stores with no sales experience, no profit orientation, and weak human resources. The Board has limited experience in consumer electronics retailing. Their big financial problem is that they have over $4 billion in off balance sheet lease commitments which prevents them from changing their store locations easily.

Schoonover is obviously a weak CEO and had no store operating experience in his background. Firing the experienced people did have a negative effect, but was not the major reason the company is in trouble. With the economy declining, weak companies will fail and CC is one of the weakest companies around.