Episode 20 - Circuit City’s Un-Launch Day

The Circuit City that is near me is THE flagship store for the entire country. If you don’t know it’s the one in Union Square (14th street) in New York. They make more money each year than any other Circuit City. They are apparently quite proud of that.

Well, yesterday I headed into Circuit City to pick up a few things. Most notably a sweet deal they had on Xbox Live Gold memberships… 40 bucks for 13 months. I couldn’t pass it up.

I went over to the video game section, which is right in the middle of the store. I immediately went to the Xbox part and snatched up a Live card. I scoped out the games they had for the 360 and was un impressed. I turned around to the Sony section expecting to see some crazy huge PS3 push but instead found nothing… well not nothing, just a lot of PS2 stuff.

But that made sense, there is a ton of PS2 stuff out, and it shared a (long) shelf with the PSP games and cases and all that. The PS3 controllers and games and other peripherals must be on the other side. I walk around to find it is nothing but audio CD’s. Strange.

I went back to where all the PS2 games are and give it a much longer look. Nope. No sign of anything PlayStation 3. Then I figure, well, maybe they put that stuff next to Wii peripherals. I assumed that since there is such an abundance of Wii’s being produced that the Game Cube section no longer existed, and it was replaced with a Wii section. But I was wrong… again.

In the Nintendo area there was an abundance of DS and GBA games, and quite a few Game Cubes, controllers and games, oh my! No sign of the Wii. None.

It was as if Circuit City hadn’t gotten the memo that new systems had launched.

I could completely understand if they had sold out of systems. I get that, it happens during a launch… especially when you only make 400,000 for an entire country. But to not support those consoles is a little ridiculous. This Circuit City is the place I have bought every peripheral for my Xbox 360, and most of my games. If I had a PS3 that is where I would have gone to pick up games or a controller or any of that. To see it not supported I would have been pissed… hell, I’m pretty angry and I don’t own either of the systems.

A store that is supposed to have all of the latest technology should have all of the latest technology. Someone dropped the ball on this.

If this, the flagship store, is any indication of what other Circuit City’s look like Nintendo and Sony should be livid. It looks like last Christmas all over again. On the shelf there were only two Xbox 360’s and both were core systems. (Last week they were stocked, mostly premiums.) Then there are Game Cubes that no one buys and a ton of PS2 games that are sold.

I believe their goal was to try and get the last of the old generation systems out the door to unsuspecting customers. If they only see PlayStation 2, maybe they’ll just buy it thinking this is what their kid wants. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is horrible customer service.