Circuit City stock was perhaps rather attractive to some at around a dollar per share; in a weird twist it’s somehow less attractive at 39 cents—maybe it’s the stink of death all around it, maybe that’s what Blockbuster smelled when they pulled out of an acquisition deal.
At this point, you could almost say Circuit City’s latest promotion is a last-ditch effort to right pricing-policy wrongs. The One Price Promise guarantees customers the same price in the store as the one listed online. But that couldn’t be the reason the company is failing—Best Buy was found out setting up fake intranet sites to trick customers into thinking they were mistaken about a listed online price, and their stock’s doing better than ever tons better than Circuit City’s.
It strikes me as odd that Circuit City even bothered with a promotion about as if it’s something special they’re doing, or that they bothered with a press release where they act surprised customers expected the online price to match the store price.
Egads! Low and behold—how strange—customers think there’s something shady about that!
News flash, CC, obviously there’s much more wrong than that. I’m not going to pretend I know what in particular is going on—Blockbuster took a look at the books and bailed, though—but I know from experience negotiating for a new TV was revealing. The TV online was something like $729, and when my wife and I got to the store the price was quite a bit higher—don’t remember exactly but it was at least a hundred bucks more. Your sales rep pulled it up on the computer and found it for the in-store price. Luckily, my wife had her BlackBerry with her and because I’d seen what went on with Best Buy I asked her to look again.
I don’t know how that would have turned out because as soon as she started downloading the Circuit City site, the manager showed up, pointed to a better and bigger TV he’d give me the same price we remembered from online.
That’s just bad business, hypothetical Circuit City executive. It makes you look really shady. At least I got my bigger and better TV. Can’t believe, though, you ever thought it was Kosher to quote different prices on the same merchandise.
Just my opinion. (Commentary is that of this writer only.)
