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.
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!
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.
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
Look upon my works and despair.
A reminder that two of those three didn’t fall, they were killed by vulture capital
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.
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.
Toys r Us is still going strong in Canada
…What else of ours have you got?
There’s still one Spencer’s gifts left in my city.
We also just recently got papa John’s but I’m too conflicted to try it
I have a teenager. Trust me, Spencer’s are still all over the U.S. As is Hot Topic.
And I hate them both.
Well I wouldn’t say strong
Stahp I just watched a 2-hour video analysis of liminal spaces, I can only get so hauntological.
K-Mart needs to be added to this
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?
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.
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.
The giraffe still lives.
Portugal still has multiple very successful Toys R Us stores, most of them more than 20 years old at this point
Empires bought by investment groups that fire all the employees, sell all the assets, and over leverage on too much debt till bankruptcy.
