Right on Time

Circuit City is shutting down. This news came on Friday, but I didn't feel like ending the week on a downer.

34,000 jobs, 567 stores... gone. The Canadian operations (The Source by Circuit City - formerly Radioshack) will stay open.

This comes as absolutely NO surprise. Anybody who has a Circuit City gift card, go and use it now. They'll be liquidating until March 31st, and the card will remain valid during that time. Naturally, they'll be worthless after that date.

The article is interesting in its honesty, if a bit short on details. CC was late to the game on tech support (like Best Buy's Geek Squad), made some of the most bone-headed managerial decisions ever (fire the experienced, helpful workers for cheaper new idiots), and genrally didn't have the first clue how to survive, even when times were good. The fact they were living off creditors speaks to how terrible a business it was.

But this only affects me in that Best Buy now has even less competition.

In more concerning news, IBM and AMD are laying off thousands of workers over the coming month as well. I have friends at both those companies, and would hate to see them out of work. Same goes for my friend at GM. Little is more depressing than everyone trading stories of how they don't have a job and aren't sure how they'll pay their mortgage, especially when they can't actually sell their house in the current market.

Over 100,000 job cuts have been announced in the new year... and it's January 19th. Obama's upped his job creation number to 4 million, but they'll hardly be jobs of equal value. Maybe I'll rant about him later.