With this company riding off into history, I decided to find out some information about it so used good old Wikipedia. Come to find out that CC has a southern heritage.
In 1949, Samuel S. Wurtzel opened the first Wards' Co. store in Richmond, Virginia. (the name Ward's not used by Montgomery Wards until its last days). By 1959, there were four Wards stores in the Richmond area and it continued to grow into other areas during the 1970s and 1980s and also began selling mail-order under the name Dixie Hi-Fi.
In Richmond, they experimented with different retail formats including "Sight-n-Sound," "Circuit City," and "Ward's Loading Dock", this last one its first Big Box effort. Big-Box clicked with customers as did the name Circuit City, and so it was.
The whole corporation officially changed their name in 1984 to Circuit City. An early commercial read "Circuit City-- Where the Streets are Paved with Bargains."
In 2007, they had 43,000 employees in the US. That's a lot of people out of work. Hopefully, upper management won't be walking out with obscene amounts of money.
Sad to See It Go. Definitely a Place Where I Did a lot of Business. --Old Coot
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