A reminder that two of those three didn't fall, they were killed by vulture capital
Private equity spent most of the 90's destroying Montgomery Ward and Eddie Lampert held Sears/KMart under the water until the bubbles stopped so he could cry to anyone that would listen that the retail business was failing while he made a fortune selling off the company's real estate.
Yup, they deliberately ran it into the ground. They took out loans against Kmart to buy Sears and sold Sears and Kmart properties off to give themselves money via stock buybacks.
And what's worse, because it worked, you can see similar actions happening to other major retail outlets. Target, in particular, seems to be following directly in the footsteps of Kmart.
Thanks for clearing the misconception. Are there any books on this you'd recommend?
There was a Wisconsin retail chain, Shopko, that fell to this, too. They bought the company, then took out loans against all the properties. Those loans were paid out as bonuses to the board, but the company had to pay the bill.
Then they minimally staffed the stores. One person handling registers, one or two behind the customer service counter, and one or two people on the floor to handle stocking and helping customers. If you needed help, you could easily be waiting around 15 minutes for anyone to come. This for a store that, while not as big as a Super Walmart, is around the size of a regular Walmart.
During the inevitable bankruptcy, it was revealed that the money taken at the register for state sales taxes was pocketed by the company rather than paid to the state.
All under the guise of "brick and mortar can't compete with Amazon". Competition was not the problem. Shopko was murdered by its own board of directors.
I still won't forgive Shopko for consuming Pamida and ultimately taking the remnants of Pamida down with it.
I'm surprised to see on Wikipedia that Shopko actually owned Pamida basically the entire time I was growing up, they just ran it independently. They even broke up breifly before re-merging later. The second merger sent it all to shit, though. "Shopko Hometown" my ass.
Shopko
Memory triggered. There was a Shopko in Nebraska near where my grandfather lived. I remember buying Super Metroid, Secret of Mana, and Mega Man Soccer there in 1994. Well, at least two of the games were great!
Why do i feel like crying...
"Fun" fact: Bain Capital killed both TRU and KayBee Toys.
Once again “the earth” is supposedly synonymous with “that one country in North America”…
It’s true. North America does in fact exist on planet earth.
All three of these businesses were worldwide so fail.
Except for circuit City before some "akchually" guy corrects me, but it was still multinational (as in 2 nations to be exact).
Once again “the earth” is supposedly synonymous with “that one country in North America”…
they gave North American examples but the statement is universally true
Lemmy users any time someone references anything American
1 of the three was killed to make some hedge fund richer. Toys r us would not have died if it hadn't been shorted in to oblivion.
I never understood circuit city. The local one ran prices 10-20% higher then best buy a few blocks over. You'd only ever go there when best buy ran out of dvd-r's.
That being said whoever worked in their gaming section and kept updating the demo kiosk with every game now labeled a "hidden gem"... Props because those were always fresh picks.
Odd, it was the other way around where I lived. CC had the best prices while BB was overpriced, and like you said, CC’s gaming section was great.
They didn't fall, they left.
Yup. Toys R Us still lives and it's still going strong in many countries like Canada and many European countries
Same as Malaysia as well, it make waves on the news but in the end it just affect the US.
You can blame BCG and shitty hedge funds for that
Wasn't that Mitt Romney and Trump's Secretary of the Treasury? (I forget his name.) But I remember him looking like a Bond villain.
you mean Munchkin?
Some empires that ought to fall... google, facebook, microsoft
You expect nothing to take their place?
...or nothing to be left
Oh certainly i expect it. But before something takes their place, would at least give a small window of hope before the replacement establishes a solid footing. We can at least know what to expect.
What the hell will take their place? Another Soviet Union?
Stahp I just watched a 2-hour video analysis of liminal spaces I can only get so hauntological
I miss Fry's Electronics Stores
I miss early 2000s Fry's Electronics. Back when they still cared.
Even 2010s Fry's was a shit show. They always sold out if the ad special of the week. They had random out of stocks that took up huge chunks of the aisles, with a lot of old, undesirable stuff left over. And then they'd give you a hard time with returns.
End stage Fry's was so weird it could have been a Terry Gilliam movie or something. Vast expanses of mostly empty aisles with the few bits of leftover inventory still there, but interspersed with filled-up cages of AliExpress junk at 10x the AE price or 3x the "get it tomorrow" Amazon price. Then there would be one or two areas where the vendors had gone along with their cockamamie "we'll sell your shit on consignment!" scam, and a few sad employees trying to avoid making eye contact.
Yet Microcenter endures.
The one in Burbank, CA was awesome. It was done in a 1950s sci-fi movie theme. The outside was made to look like a UFO crashed into it.
And an Alice in Wonderland themed one in the valley
We still have one in Illinois but I'm not sure how it's still holding on. Used to love going in there. Loads of specialized parts and equipment as well as staff that were super knowledgeable and helpful. But at least we have Microcenter now... Which is like if you took a Fry's and scaled it down and made it work more like a car dealership 😭😭😭
I was just gonna say. So many good memories with my dad going to Fry's. The sole reason i went HARD into techie stuff
Last time I went to one (2020), the shelves were 80% empty, and what they had was mostly karaoke machines on consignment sale.
It was super depressing.
What's the one on the bottom right?
Circuit City IIRC
Look up on my works ye mighty and despair
There is a Toys R Us a few blocks away from me that I used to go to as a kid and it's wild to me that only in the last year has anything been done to it and all that was done is someone erected a chain link fence around the property to keep people out because it was pretty popular for hooking up and selling drugs given in its in a sparsely populated area and has absolutely no lights around. Like it still has the sign and shit, the building has just sat completely abandoned for over a decade since TRU went bankrupt.
We had Blockbusters and Circuit City and even a Mervyn's here. The buildings have all been re-used though. Just the TRU and the Orchard Supply next to it have sat unchanged over the years, like ruined relics of the past.
Look upon my works and despair.
I miss my frys electronics and their goofy buildings
At least microcenter will come to my hometown soon
My only complaint with microcenter is that the commission in incentives come off as extreme. Like I will be walking around with something in my hand and a rando will come up to me, say "hey there boss, lemme just slap this on that for you," and proceed to put a sticker on it with their ID. Not a big deal, but palpable, and makes it harder to just browse.
Like the Pizza Hut turned Bank turned Chinese Food Restaurant turned Fed Ex Pack and Ship
Turned back to pizza hut in a few instances
There was always a certain ambiance in Circuit City that I found to be appealing. At least on my local one before it closed down. It was like the lights were dimmed way down, but it was still bright enough to see. I guess you would call that "cool temperature" lighting, which is definitely not fashionable anymore. Everything nowadays seems to follow Apple's store design which is this sterile eggshell white, bathed in neutral or warm temperature lighting. I find it kind of boring, but I understand why they do it that way.
Plus, I loved how instantly recognizable their old stores were. The big red block turned at an angle for an entrance was brilliant imo. They used it a lot in their television commercials and made it look like a plug end or a battery coming down from the sky.
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Great, now I've got to go watch "The Ballard of Buster Scruggs" again
Of course, some months later as fall approached, travellers saw stretched between the ruined pillars a banner proclaiming: Spirit Halloween Now Hiring!
It is the end of everything.
The giraffe still lives.
This is why I'm so angry that billionaires managed to convince people there are companies that are "too big to fail".
Our tax dollars have been used to prop up private companies.
Yet it couldn't save toys r us?
Yet it couldn't save toys r us?
Nope. Because Toys R Us was murdered by an investment firm.
That graphic in the second link, holy shit
Yeah, pretty sad to see. Shopping at all the different department stores was pretty cool back then. But now it's all Macy's.
Unregulated capitalism destroys everything it touches, including itself.
"Let me put it this way. A corporation is like a big, hungry monster. My job is to find plenty of smaller, weaker monsters for it to eat."
Empires bought by investment groups that fire all the employees, sell all the assets, and over leverage on too much debt till bankruptcy.
Portugal still has multiple very successful Toys R Us stores, most of them more than 20 years old at this point
There's still a Blockbuster sign up by the freeway near where I used to live. There wasn't a Blockbuster there even when I moved there 10 years ago.
I actually worked at the second to last block busters. It was sad like having a job inside a dying person. Every month it was a new gimmick to get people back. But still fewer and fewer people showed up. You could feel the end coming.
Why did Best Buy survive buy Circuit City went under? They were basically the same thing, so what did they do differently?
Circuit City's management made several consecutive catastrophic fuckups which ultimately led to the company's demise. The most widely publicized one was firing all of their experienced staff and attempting to backfill all of those positions with minimum wage newbies. This obviously backfired spectacularly.
They also dropped a stable, profitable high-margin product category (appliances) to focus on an unstable, low-margin category instead (TV's and personal electronics).
They also invested heavily into selling loads of televisions. They stocked up on TVs for the holiday season using purchase orders (basically using an IOU to pay back later), but when they were stuck with all thier unsold stock they folded since they couldn't pay those bills.
Oh and Best Buy owes its survival to investing heavily into cell phone plans and contracts. They would've folded without it.
Even now they get lots of company kickbacks from Sony, Samsung, Apple, Sonos, etc to be a showroom for stuff.
I think it's a Highlander scenario, there can only be one.
As someone that shopped at both, but preferred Circuit City, I think Best Buy initially did a better job of "wowing" customers and had a better store layout. They also were better at trying to squeeze money out of people and thus were more profitable than Circuit City, so when times got leaner they survived and then had the whole market.
Circuit City was great until it wasn’t.
Sucks.
RIP Fry's.
K-Mart needs to be added to this
pour one down for Fry’s
That's the Chula Vista toys r us and the San Diego Fry's. Right?
That’s a circuit city, not a fry’s
LOL 😅
Best buy is coming to join them
The way these buildings were built tell you they weren't intended to be around for long. Four cinder block walls and a flat metal roof. Cheap to put up, easy to tear down
These buildings have generally been around for longer than the companies that moved in and then went bankrupt 🤷♂️
Yet they're rarely torn down. Other stores hermit crab into the space.
