Spolsky: Why Circuit City Failed, and Why B&H Thrives
inc.com
inc.com
Schmucks.
Vehemently!
A colleague introduced the phrase to me in conjunction with Hurricane factors. So walking into a meeting to discuss why a particualr release was late, he would whisper to me, "Stand by for a Force Three Blamestorm!"
Are they blaming everyone else because they failed or did they fail because they were too busy blaming to act?
When things start going poorly, they cast blame.
Since they were busy casting blame rather than doing their jobs, things got worse.
Any time I'm in NYC I try to visit B&H just to absorb the atmosphere and play with all the awesome toys.
It was the biggest highlight of the trip for me.
Statue of liberty is one thing, everyone has seen that, but the store is great. :D
I love Beards&Hats. Always have to stop by when I'm in the area; the whole place is like a small electronics amusement park.
This is how I feel about Newegg.com. I used to be a daily visitor to pricewatch.com, which compares the prices of electronics, until I found myself regularly ending on up Newegg, and decided that it was easier to just hit newegg directly. Now I buy almost all my gear from them.
Overall happy with paying a bit(not much) more for a lot more convenience and speed.(newegg gets to me in a day if I purchase by noon to noon-thirty, amazon in two.)
That I can believe. I made the mistake of going in to Circuit City's going-out-of-business sale to find a wide screen TV, only to find they were all at least $200 more than I'd spend at Sam's Club or Costco. It seemed they had no care if they sold any merchandise whatsoever.
all the "good" stuff will be marked up to or past MSRP and then marked back down again to the level of their original costs just so that they can legally advertise huge-sounding discounts. they mark something up so that they can then put a "30% off" sticker on it and run an advertisement, despite the price not actually changing.
you won't find anything worth buying until the final days when they really do discount items. but by then, the "good" stuff is gone because the liquidators have tricked unwitting consumers into buying it up.
Just curious
Circuit City - Clueless sales people, (I was once told that a laptop I was looking at "has to run vista because of the drivers that are installed"), dishonest business practices and prices that are guaranteed to be significantly higher than what you see in other places.
The question is will B&H become a victim of its own success? As Joel says in the article, he doesn't even comparison shop anymore. I've been using B&H for years, and while I don't comparison shop, I almost always go with B&H because of their terrific customer service and I always know what I'm getting (none of that annoying "well, you know this model doesn't come with a battery" bullshit).
My experience tells me that eventually something will change in the mindset of the org, either the guy calling the shots will start to cash in on those years of trust, or his son will take over and he will cash in, or they become a publicly traded company where the board members care more about next quarters profits than a long term sustainable business. I would wager Joel's article will accelerate that process.
That makes me wonder...perhaps the publicly traded corporate structure is not conducive to a company that wants to win on price, quality and customer experience.
i actually recently introduced someone to b&h in person for the first time and it was like watching a kid in a toy store for the first time. b&h is everything most people in this thread make it out to be - an electronic equivalent of willy wonkas chocolate factory. and it is also true that the staff there really know their stuff. they have no problem telling you whats shit and whats not.
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090501/why-circuit-city-failed...
That will save you an interstitial ad and 30 seconds of page load before the "printer friendly" link shows up.
Somebody might want to re-point the item.
Bloated pages (both visually and in terms of file size) are a problem, but linking directly to printer-friendly pages is not a suitable fix, IMHO.
Avoiding advertising also bothers me (even more than the actual advertisements bother me) in general, because I like information, and information generally costs money to acquire - especially high-quality, reliable information. Newspapers and their investigative journalism appear to be going away, and that makes me sad.
Note: I'm not familiar with Inc. magazine, so discussing quality journalism may or may not be entirely relevant in this context.
Best of both worlds: Open the "printer friendly" version of an article and execute the readability javascript bookmarklet: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
This is easily rectified by a single click and drag to resize the browser window to your preferred column width.
I for one much prefer print links for reading articles.
If you don't like ads, block them. I like well formatted text that doesn't require user intervention every time I go to a new page. That's sort of the entire fucking POINT of web design.
I totally agree. Unfortunately, many commercial pages present poorly-formatted text framed by blinking or brightly-colored distractions. I exercise a bit of user intervention to load the print link -- I just want the text, and I can size the column(s) easily.
Shoplifting, maybe. Employee theft, no. The Hasidim already have the world's best deterrent to employee theft: you are banned for life from the community. Period. No warnings. No discussion.
Imagine if wall street had that rule.
Most of their store inventory is in the basement warehouse (and plenty of other inventory must be off-site entirely). There's simply no other way of fulfilling that much volume in a real-time retail environment.
Edit: hmmm wait, this tab was obviously already open for quite some time... a dozen comments have materialized, including some I'm now duping. Sorry.
More randomness for the hell of it: I read the Yiddish Policemen's Union the other week and cannot recommend it highly enough. (It's a noir detective alt-history set in a Jewish analogue of Hong Kong in Alaska, where the local organized crime are Hasidic, the slang name for them is "black hats.") (It also manages to be a page-turner without any of that guilty feeling of "I just read 300 pages without thinking a single original thought" that so many page-turners leave you with.)
Would you be willing to risk everything important to you, not just your job, but your family, friends, home, and community, on the chance that someone may have seen you take a $5 item?
Sex outside of marriage is much more frowned-upon in the Hasidic community than petty theft, and yet there are Hasidim who have been caught soliciting prostitutes.
Think about yourself. You have certain principles which in moments of weakness are violated.
I, in principle, go to sleep early. Here I am posting at 10:17PM (South African time) on Hacker News. Principle violated. People are only human.
(including that snotty bastard in the studio lighting department-- B&H salespeople can be a little brusque)
I've probably spent upwards of $10k there over the years-- just bought $200 in grip on Sunday.
I love this article. Thanks for posting it wyday.
But go look at their web page: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/ "The Professional's choice' - lots of high end cameras and camcorders, and so forth. A majority of their customers are highly knowledgeable as well, and they have a long-established reputation in the pro film/video community as a reliable supplier. That means they can sell a lot of items with a huge markup, because the customers are not looking for the best deal, but are willing to pay more for both customer service and equipment with lots of features. Although B&H caters to the general consumer, they probably don't make their biggest profits in that sector.
This is a very significant difference, and rather undermines the analysis in the article. It's like comparing a Ferrari dealership with a Ford one, or a professional medical supply business with a drugstore chain. There are useful lessons to be learned, but they're very different business models which (as commented) don't necessarily scale to different markets. If B&H were primarily targeting the general consumer, the overhead costs of educating every potential buyer would skyrocket.
Incidentally, the bit about the item being delivered to the counter where it is inspected, and then delivered to the point of sale etc. gave me quite a chuckle. Minus the high-tech and conveyer belts, this was exactly how department stores in the Soviet Union operated when I visited there in the 1980s. In fact it was one of the things you'd find in guidebooks - 'those crazy commies - they hate capitalism so much that they make the process of buying something wildly inefficient!' I would never have imagined I'd see this model praised in the pages of Inc.
And customer service isn't exactly what comes to mind when thinking about B&H. The operation is run to be efficient and maximize profit not to enhance the "customer experience", though often the two intertwine.
They've found a good niche but if they tried to put one of these stores in every city across the country, as they say, "it wouldn't scale".
But there's also the place it has in the community. From their Wikipedia article (so take it for what it's worth): "Surpassed only by the Diamond District in terms of Orthodox employment, the company is a vital part of the community's financial health, with hundreds of Orthodox Jews on staff."
That doesn't scale either.
He states that he doesn't actually know how B&H is doing financially so there isn't any proof that they are a successful business other than his description of personal experience. He states that they are not open for business as much as they could be which I would find annoying as a customer. The site shuts down that often? You gotta be kidding me.
Any business trying to compete on thin profit margins and/or is too dependent on loans to keep their business running is certainly not going to thrive in this economy. Unfortunately, I don't think customer service will be the deciding factor for many companies right now.
But yeah, as far as personal experience I avoided Circuit City too as the only experiences I had were so negative. I wouldn't say other stores like Best Buy have any more than a tolerable customer experience on average.
I have ordered much stuff from them; would love to visit them in person sometime.