Circuit City Closing

Looks like Circuit City is closing its doors for good.

Circuit City, once a bellwether American retailer, is going out of business for good, stripping the nation of its second-largest consumer electronics chain.

Read more from the New York Times

I have to say that I am not surprised, but it is sad to see so many people losing their jobs. Circuit City has more than 30,000 employees. Some of them will probably find new jobs, but most of them will likely end up as another statistic in the next round of unemployment figures.

I have never liked the way that Circuit City ran their business. Read my previous post on the subject. I thought they put way too much emphasis on selling extended warranties and not enough on customer service. I also thought that their upper-level management treated their employees poorly.

I hope the cretins that ran this company into the ground find themselves unemployed for a long time to come, but I fear that won't happen. They will be hired on someplace else because of the "valuable executive experience" that they have. The majority of the deckplate level workers will probably have difficulty finding a good job because their experience is in retail sales, a sector that is being destroyed by the current economic conditions in the United States.

For people that are wondering about their extended warranties, this is what was posted on the Circuit City website.

I purchased an extended warranty (Circuit City Advantage Plan). Will that still be honored?
Yes, absolutely. Our Advantage Plan service is handled through dedicated service companies not affiliated with Circuit City, ensuring that there will be no disruption in your ability to get service for your covered products.

Link to Circuit City Help: General Information

The CEO also addressed this issue in a letter written last month:

Circuit City Advantage Protection Plans^® are offered by a third-party company and are not impacted by transitions in Circuit City's business.

Link to CEO's Letter

A Better Bailout

One of the news stories that came out while I was at my parents house was the new estimated cost of all the US Financial Bailout. It was estimated at 8.317 trillion dollars.

Read the Article at CNBC

I looked at the U.S. Popclock Projection from the United States Census Bureau and it estimates that there are 305,801,765 people in the United States (as of the time that I am posting this). I would have been a lot happier if our government had decided to send every man, woman, and child in the United States a check for $27,197.36. It might not have solved the economic crisis, but I would be $27,197.36 richer, and frankly, it doesn't look like that money has done much good for our troubled financial system.

Actually, I lied. I would not rather see people receive the money directly. But I sure do wish it would have been spent better. The problem has come about due to sub-prime lending, a crashing housing market, record numbers of home foreclosures, the high gas prices of the last year, etc.. These have led to frozen credit markets. I guess I don't understand all of the reasons for the credit market drying up like it has. I can certainly understand that it has gotten smaller as the banks realized that they had made some bad loans, but there certainly are still some good loans to be made that are simply not being made now because of fear. Throwing this $8.317 trillion at the losers in our free-market system hasn't helped to any discernible level. Good risks are not being taken.

The money from the bailout is only a life line to keep certain companies, primarily financial companies, afloat. These companies make money on commerce and consumption of goods. Unfortunately, commerce and consumption of goods is drying up and I think it is accelerating. I really wish that our government had let these companies take their lumps and spent this money in other ways.

Government statistics put the number of unemployed in the United States at about 10.1 million. If the government had instead promised 10.1 million jobs at $50,000 annual salary for 5 years, the total price tag would have been $2.525 trillion. We could have people at work on improving infrastructure, picking up trash, digging ditches...whatever. I don't know exactly what every one of these 10.1 million people would do, but I bet work could be found that generally benefited the nation.

Now, I know that this sounds a lot like welfare and people would also say that we don't want to increase peoples dependency on the government. These are both valid arguments. I would counter that we have spent triple the amount of money on corporate welfare and have increased the financial system's dependency on government.

The government says that they will get most of this money back. This may be true, but I am fairly certain they won't get it all back.

I think there is more to be gained by putting people to work for 5 years. The government would immediately recoup some of the money in the form of taxes. In addition to this, unemployed people that suddenly became employed would greatly reduce the burden on social services. These formerly unemployed people would also increase the tax base for states, many of which are struggling with reduced tax revenue in the current recession. Furthermore, these workers would not be scared to spend their money. This would cause increased consumer demand and the supply side would respond by expanding. Hopefully, they would need new workers and could begin to hire some of the people that are in the limited-time government jobs and would begin to wean the country off of the temporary employment program. It would serve to prime the pump, so to speak, that is the United States economy.

A rising tide lifts all boats. I don't think that this is the context in which that phrase was meant to be used, but I think it is apt.

I am not saying that this is what should have been done. However, I think it would have done a lot more good for our economy than all these trillions of dollars that have been thrown at the problem.

I know that it is not practical or possible to get to a zero percent unemployment rate. I know, from listening to conservative talk radio, that nearly every unemployed person in the country is really just too lazy to work and that they enjoy collecting huge welfare and unemployment checks and spending my money. Still, I hold out hope that some people that don't work would enjoy having a job.

Off to Bremerton

I will be leaving for Bremerton shortly. I get to have my second job interview with Puget Sound Naval Shipyard on Monday. They seem to be pretty interested in hiring me. Hopefully, it will go well.

I spent a little time looking into going to work for some of the big oil companies. Most of them try to make you feel like they are God's Gift to chemical engineers and that we should be down on our hands and knees begging to be found worthy enough of being hired. I get the feeling that they consider workers to be disposable assets rather than valued employees. There is an oil refinery here in Washington, but not too many other big oil jobs in the region. Well, I guess I could probably get a job pumping gas, but that is pretty far down on my list of desirable jobs.

There are a few other nuclear industry types that have shown a lot of interest in hiring me as well. Still, the shipyard in Bremerton is at the top of my list as far as desired location goes, so they have the inside track right now.

Some of the guys that graduated last year declined to take a government job, because of the higher pay available in the private sector. Some of them have already been laid off. Private sector does look pretty good, but I would rather have a good job with good job security than a great job with lousy job security. The current economic situation is influencing my feelings towards job-hunting more than I thought it would.

Anyway, I have to shower and pack, and be on my way. Have a great weekend, everybody!!!

Circuit City Bankruptcy

UPDATE: 1/16/09 I have written another post about the announcement that Circuit City is closing and including information for people with extended warranties.

I read today that Circuit City is filing for bankruptcy protection. I am not a big fan, nor even small fan of Circuit City. The only good shopping experience I ever had there was when I lived in Aeia, Hawaii. I lived about a five minute walk from the Circuit City near Pearlridge. I was able to order a new computer online and go to pick it up.

When I picked it up, a salesman tried to con me into buying an extended warranty. I told him I was not interested. He told me that I was making a big mistake, blah, blah, blah... I cut him off and asked if the store was selling me a piece of crap that was going to break down, because I wouldn't want to buy it if that was the case. He continued to go on about how I should get an extended warranty. I told him to shut up or I wouldn't buy the computer. He shut up.

I hate these guys trying to sell you these extended warranties. Circuit City has built a business built more on extended warranties than on their sales. I always considered an extended warranty through Circuit City to be a waste of money. Now that everyone is facing tighter times, I bet more people consider it a waste of money. Add that on top of overall sales slowing down, it is no surprise that Circuit City is in trouble.

Something else for a consumer to consider is whether or not Circuit City will even be in business a few months down the road. If they won't be, then a longer warranty is certainly a waste of money.

I really don't like Circuit City, if you haven't noticed by now. The last straw for me was watching management openly screw their workers.

The electronics retailer, facing larger competitors and falling sales, said Wednesday that it would lay off about 3,400 store workers — immediately — and replace them with lower-paid new hires as soon as possible.

The laid-off workers, about 8 percent of the company’s total work force, would get a severance package and a chance to reapply for their former jobs, at lower pay, after a 10-week delay, the company said.

Read the March 2007 story here

Of course, with the plummeting stock prices at the time, I guess that the Company Executives had to screw over thousands of ordinary people so that they could somehow justify huge paychecks for themselves. Like a lot of executives for major companies and corporations, these executives have shown themselves to be Morally Bankrupt. Now, Circuit City, under their leadership, is Financially Bankrupt.