Circuit City Lying, deception and more Natick Massachusetts

What are you talking about? Nobody knew they were closing down the company in november..

You are an idiot. They were having talks with 2 parties this past week. They were offered 20 million to have there books kept open for 1 more month, but the courts said no.

Twit.

You were so great that as soon as they let you go in 2003 you knew that the company could not last long. Well they lasted for 5 years without you..

You thought that the company was great "Up until they laid me off.". Yea I can see how you can get a bit disapointed in a company that lets you go. Yet you didn't seem to dislike the company enough to stop using your friends discounts. After all what other "benefit" could you get from having your friends work there.

Were you the ONLY ex-employee that they told that they were actually going to close all of the stores? What made you special enough to be privy to this information. I would think that if they told every current and ex-employee over the last 5 years that this would have "leaked" out. Yet your comment is the first I have ever heard of this...Ummm how could that be?

As the previous poster said, they tried to keep the remaining stores open, but there were no buyers. So they had no choice but to close the remaining stores.

I am sorry that you hate Circuit City, perhaps because you are losing the ability to use your friends discounts. But I think you are trying to give yourself a little more importance than you actually have. Hopefully in this 5 years you moved on to a better and more satisfying job.

Businesses go out of business all the time. I expected Circuit City to go out of business a long time ago. So what?

They lasted longer than I thought they would have.

I'm trying to find the ripoff here; how are consumers hurt by this? They're out of business because consumers don't shop there....

early-November, 2008: Circuit City announced it has filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy, after liquidating 155 stores a week before and layed-off 700 employees at its headquarters.

-Why would a company that "knew" it was closing all of it's stores file Chapter 11? And why would they close 155 stores if 5 months from then they planned on closing all stores? Answer: They were reorganizing their assets, and reducing their workforce to offset their creditors' debt. You don't do that when you plan on closing anyway.

November 18, 2008: Ricardo Salinas Pliego, owner of Mexican tv broadcasting company TV Azteca, purchases 28% of Circuit City's stock.

-If the employees knew the company was closing, why would one of the world's richest people purchase ANY stock in that company. Surely he would've known what the employees knew.

early-January, 2009: It's announced that Circuit City was taking bids from outsiders to take over the failing company. Two unnamed parties, one being Pliego, were showing interest. Pliego was given permission to completely go through Circuit City's books to weigh his options.

-Again, why would anyone show interest in buying them out if Circuit City already knew they couldn't survive?

Let me tell you why. The only admissions by Circuit City of their debt were $119 Million to Hewlett-Packard and $116 Million to Samsung Electronics. They did state they had a total debt of $2.32 Billion compared to $3.4 Billion in assets. Add the $1.6 Billion the courts allowed them to borrow during the Chapter 11, and you have $.72 Billion in debt. Pliego himself could've wiped out that debt and kept the company open. What I believe happened was Circuit City had more debt then they publicly admitted, and couldn't dig themselves out. If they lied about their debt to the world, they surely wouldn't have told their employees they were going to close down in November, 2008. Mis-management brought this company down. Not poor customer service, not over-pricing (when prices were pretty much on par with every other electronics store). Greed, the American way!

"Integrity, honesty and trust are vital in the business world."

The current economic crisis is because businesses do not have Integrity, Honesty OR trust!

Business is run by greedy overpaid executives rewarded for ruining the companies they work for and getting huge bonuses for doing it.

Integrity, honesty and trust have not applied in corporate america for a quite some time now.

I have it seen it first hand!

I am currently one of the thousands of employees that works at circuit city and will be losing my job here very shortly. I think this post is completely wrong. I have been with the company now for a little over three years. I am a supervisor at circuit city and know many upper level management people with whom i talk to on a daily basis. This ex employee says that everyone knew that they were shutting down stores and the company completely lied to everyone. this is way false! As a current employee who talks to their store director daily, we were told that back in november when they were starting to shut all of the stores down that it was to save money and to try and save the company. They also said that depending on how well we did over the holiday season would also determine if we would continue to stay in business or not. the CEO even posted a statement on our circuit city forum (which is only available to employees) that the company was in a very tough situtation right now and to be quite honest there was a possibility of the company going out but he wasn't sure. he made this very clear to all of the associates before hand and i honestly think that they really didn't know what was going to happen. I have inside information too and the company in my personal opinion was not trying to lie to their customer or employees. I love the company and wish this never happened but it did happen for a reason. I'm not sure where this person got their inside information from but its False and Fabricated!