Friday, January 16, 2009

BREAKING NEWS! Circuit City starts liquidation. (1-16-09)

Today Circuit City went down, filing for Chapter 7. This I hate to see as it hurts all everyone, consumers and other consumer electronic businesses alike. Now there is no other big alternative competitor to CC (Tweeter closed its doors a month ago) other than Best Buy. Walmart, Target, Costco, and a few others are trying to be in the consumer electronics market, but they have no ability to provide knowledge, installation or service to the consumer. It hurts manufacturers as they have fewer outlets to offer product through, reducing innovation as some of the smaller, yet more innovative manufacturers will also fold without outlets for their products.



What about the smaller specialty dealers like Upstairs Audio & Video? Though our business is now up due to the demise of Tweeter and the “trunk slammers” (those custom installers with a card that has a name, number and no address-they work out of their trunk), and due to the economic downturn (we always see our business go up when the economy gets tight as people shop harder and want better product and better information and service-it has been this way for decades for us), I find no joy in this. I realize that innovation will suffer, knowledge and information will suffer, and good sound and video will suffer. People will no longer have outlets with variety and choice, just more of the same old mass market mediocre product, meant to entice with too many features, decoy beauty, and “cheap” price. There is far too much poor HDTV on the market, not anywhere near the potential of what is being broadcast.



It is a strange new world, and though I am thankful for all of you that support us and what we do at Upstairs Audio & Video, keeping us as busy as we have ever been in a January, I hope that quality specialty manufacturers can still exist and continue to push the envelope of quality and new technology.



Read the articles on CC:



http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/patterson/33343



http://www.twice.com/article/CA6630329.html

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