Circuit City is coming back, baby

By Sam Barsanti  |  January 28, 2016 | 8:25pm
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According to tech news outlet Twice, bankrupt retail chain Circuit City is coming back. For those who don’t recall, Circuit City was exactly like Best Buy, except it was all red and white instead of blue and yellow, and also a lot of the stores had a weird smell that was impossible to place. It was this sort of dry, irritating stink that just made you want to shop for DVDs and PlayStation 2 games somewhere else. Anyway, the company shuttered all of its stores in 2008, possibly because of a persistent rumor about how they smelled really weird.

The Circuit City brand is now owned by a rich guy named Ronny Shmoel, and Twice says that he has an “ambitious, multi-tiered game plan” to get the chain back on top. This game plan sounds a lot like what Best Buy has been doing for a while, with “retail outlets, web sales, branded and private-label products, licensed kiosks, mobile shops, and franchise opportunities,” but considering that Amazon hasn’t been able to kill Best Buy yet, it must be worth emulating. Shmoel’s plan actually goes further than that, though, because the new Circuit City will also be “targeted directly at millennials” and feature an emphasis on selling “tablets, notebooks, wearables, networking equipment, gaming products, headphones, drones, 3-D printers, health appliances,” and other expensive things that millennials are too busy vaping to buy.

The Circuit City website will relaunch in the spring, and the first new retail store will open in Dallas this June. Hopefully it’ll still have that classic Circuit City smell.

[via Engadget]

 
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