Circuit City Fired Its Best Workers for Earning Too Much

One morning in 2007, at 8:15, Circuit City gathered its best salespeople in every store and fired them all. By that evening the stock went up. Two years later the chain was gone, 567 stores and 34,000 jobs. Amazon did not kill it. The company did it to itself, and it did it twice. Only a few years earlier Circuit City was named one of the greatest companies in America in the famous business book Good to Great. It had invented the electronics superstore, and its real edge was simple, expert salespeople on commission who could explain any product. Then new leadership, brought in from rival Best Buy, cut those commissioned experts in 2003 and again in 2007 to save money on wages. In plain words this video walks through how the service collapsed, the customers left, and a sixty-year-old icon slid into bankruptcy in 2008, one more name on the list of dead retail chains. It is a piece of corporate history about the one thing a company cannot buy back quickly. If you like true stories about the rise and fall of once-great American names, subscribe and stay for more.