You Will NOT be Missed September 4, 2014

In the past, I have lamented on this site about companies and products which are either no longer available or no longer as great as they once were. This is not that kind of article. This editorial is on the companies that are no longer with us and we are probably all the better for it. So sit back and relax as I say good riddance to several entities which have had the decency to go away, although it was probably due to their own incompetency.

Circuit City – Dennis Miller once said, “You could encircle the globe at the equator with just four and a half Circuit City receipts.” I actually remember fondly when this store opened in my area. You could find a decent selection of CDs at the exact same price everyone else was charging for them. You could find a limited selection of PC games, but wouldn’t find competitive prices if you wanted to buy them. You could also find a decent selection of DVDs back when the format was brand new (read: expensive). Unfortunately the good times were not to last. In the last few years of Circuit City’s existence I tried unsuccessfully to find anyone actually working at the store. I don’t mean the stores didn’t have employees, they did, you could find them all over the place just standing around. The problem was the registers were NEVER manned. You’re a retail store, not a museum. How can you sell products if you don’t have people ready to take your orders? Anyone making a new purchase at the store would find themselves in customer service where they would typically have to wait about twenty minutes to ring up their purchase as the eighty year old couple in front of them argued with the clerks over restocking fees for a printer they couldn’t figure out and probably shouldn’t have bought in the first place.

The last time I shopped there was on the day Iron Man was released on Blu Ray Disc. Now, you need to understand that Iron Man up to this point had been one of the biggest theatrical releases of the year. The store sold out its stock by 3PM. The store’s manager was dumbfounded, saying he hadn’t seen such a demand for a Blu Ray movie since Transformers was released on the format some time earlier. I asked him if he took into consideration heavily stocking a new film that everyone at the time thought was really good, but I didn’t get much of a response from him. So they wouldn’t maintain a decent stock of products in heavy demand and wouldn’t keep their infrastructure manned for the people who did want to purchase from them. No wonder they’re no longer around.

Blockbuster Video – Want to go out of the way and spend a lot of money renting old poor quality VHS tapes for short periods of time? Want to watch the movie longer? You run the risk of racking up large late charges, putting your credit rating in danger if you forget to return something. The company’s business plan was based around the early days of the home video market, as the price of movies and movie players were incredibly expensive. They offered short term rentals of films for much lower prices. But like with all technologies, if it is successful eventually the prices will drop. In the days when the prices of DVDs were relatively inexpensive, Blockbuster continued with their antiquated policies as new services with better business models emerged in the changing home video market. As the company started to flounder in the new millennium as better rental options were made available to consumers the company decided to try some more slightly deceptive practices instead of improving their business model. They announced they were dropping their late fees as companies like Netflix had been doing since they started their DVD mail rental service years earlier. What they didn’t tell people in their commercials was they would charge customers full price for the movie if they kept their rental for more than a week. They actually lost in court when someone filed suit over that omission.

About the only thing people remember fondly about this store is they used to have a kiosk where you could print out the pictures you took in Pokémon Snap. That kiosk is heavily sought after by collectors and Pokémon fans alike. I wish Nintendo sold those kiosks, they were so cool.

E for All – After the downsizing of E3 in 2007, several trade shows stepped up to fill the vacuum with mixed results. One of them was E for All (E4), and they planned to offer a trade show like E3 where the public would be allowed into the event. To promote the event, they crashed other people’s expos, offering trinkets and other branded bobbles without the permission of the expo’s organizers. Ever wanted to know what the LA Convention Center looked like when it was empty? Pay 90 dollars for a three day pass to E for All and you will. You could see everything the expo had to offer before the end of the first day you were there, freeing you up to do other things during your stay in LA, like attend the live taping of a HBO show that would get interrupted by truthers. They had another event in 2008, but when E3 returned in 2009 the expo’s organizers just decided to give up instead of competing with the biggest trade show in the world.