Circuit City Lowdown

Yep, yet another job of mine has gone under. First, The Sharper Image and now Circuit City. I still miss Sharper Image. I had it really good there and if they hadn't bankrupted I would still be there. I will miss the people I work with at CCity, but I won't miss the job. I have no benefits, only part-time hours, and it's not as inviting an environment as Sharper Image was. However, here in our store, there is a lot "family". For those of my non-gay readers, "family" is code for gay. We had some of them over last night for our soup potluck. It went really well.

So I've been reading a lot of articles and blogs about Circuit City's liquidation deals. As I have managed a store going through liquidation, I have more experience then those writers and bloggers. So here's the lowdown: Sales start at 10% off and will get larger incrementally. So yeah, 10% is not a great deal! It barely pays for sales tax. But patience! If we could all wait 2-3 weeks before purchasing stuff we could probably get 50% off. I guess most customers have no experience with liquidation either. I have customers asking me all the time, "so when do the good deals start?"

It doesn't help that the liquidators haven't even shown up at our store yet. They should have giant signs listing the percentage off. The registers should show the current discount as well. Right now the Customer Service Associates, Supervisors, and Managers are the only people who can do the price change. The rest of us associates just stand around and answer questions or point people towards products. I hear that come tomorrow the prices will be in the registers. So I'll finally be able to ring people up and lessen the work load of my associates.

So finding good prices at Circuit City or any other liquidating store will always be a gamble. You can wait till the discounts are worth it and risk the product you want not being there, or you can buy at the micro-discount of 10-20% and be sure to get what you want. As for the claims that liquidators raise the prices before they "discount", that may be true, but not at Circuit City or Sharper Image. If they wanted to do that, they'd have to remove and replace tens of thousands of price tags. Neither they nor we have time for that.

So, I have at least 60 days of pay. I using that time to find myself a job. If you know of any jobs available, I have retail and retail management experience. I can certainly give you my resume.

Doing well

I really love my job. I feel really lucky that I found one that fits me so well. I like what I do, I like coming into work, and I like all my co-workers. They're my friends. The icing on the cake is that I actually do *well* at this job. Last week, we had our new employee of the month sign put up. It was me! I don't know if there are qualifications outside of how much you sell, but I did the best with somewhere around $47,000 in sales for December. Yeah, even I was surprised.

For January I sold the most PWPs. (I don't know what the acronym stands for.) PWPs are the items that are half off with purchase for the month. We have to tell each customer that as they check out. I had a really good percentage.

For the past several weeks, I've been doing superb too. John, our manager is excellent at sales. It is almost always impossible to beat him. Our assistant manager is awesome too. But lately I've been selling more than the two of them combined. :D

Okay, one last toot on my horn. For February there is a nationwide contest amongst the stores as to who can sell the most of a certain product. I didn't realize this until a few days ago when we received an e-mail with the current standings. On the district, store, and associate level, we are number two. But that was the day before I sold $1500 of that product. I'm pretty sure I'm number one now. And if I can keep that up... 1st prize is $500!

All of this puts me in such a good mood. It isn't because I'm winning, but because I'm loving what I'm doing. I think my numbers are good because of that. You're good at what you like, and you like what you're good at.