Circuit City Sucks
Mar 29th, 2007 by John Setzler
I was listening to NPR while on a few errands this evening. I caught some brief blurb about Circuit City ditching a bunch of employees in favor of ones who will work for less money. I made a mental note and decided to check it out in a little more detail when I got home.
It seems that the electronic giant cares absolutely nothing about its employees. If someone goes to work here and gives a piece of his or her life to the company, what they have to look forward to in the future is being canned. In a real-world business model, this seems a bit backwards to me. When you have a certain amount of time and money invested in an employee through training and any potential benefits provided, it seems counterproductive to send them home in favor of someone who will work for a dollar or two less per hour. It’s already hard enough to find a salesperson in those stores who can really tell you what you want to know about the products they sell. So now, those who probably know the most will be signing up for unemployment and will be replaced by a new batch of high school kids who know a good bit about the latest video games. I wonder what the cost for the company will be in unemployment insurance? I wonder how many of those employees will actually take a pay cut to keep their jobs?
The article states very simply that people didn’t lose their jobs because of performance or any other issues. It was clearly stated that the amount of money they were making was not consistent with whatever market studies the company had done. What a slap in the face…
I don’t work for Circuit City and I never have. After reading this story, I’ll not shop there anymore either. A company who would treat their own employees this way probably don’t have a large amount of respect for their customers either. If the cared about me as a consumer, they would want senior employees dealing with me whenever possible.
So, in a nutshell, Circuit City has just become the McDonalds of electronics superstores. You can go to work there, but you can’t advance beyond a number on a spreadsheet, no matter how hard you work. The article didn’t discuss any pay cuts that management was taking to increase profitibility.