Who owns Circuit City today?
The Circuit City name belongs to Circuit City Corporation, a privately held company run by retail investor Ronny Shmoel, who bought the brand and the trademark rights from Systemax in 2016. Systemax had picked up the name and the CircuitCity.com domain for about $14 million in the 2009 bankruptcy sale and ran it as an online storefront for several years before selling it on.
Shmoel relaunched the brand online in 2018. There is no chain behind it. Circuit City in 2026 is a website and a licensing play, not a retailer with its own buildings, and not one of the 567 stores that closed in 2009 has reopened under the name.
In November 2023 the company announced a Series A funding round and a shop-in-shop program it calls "Powered by Circuit City," with JCPenney named as the first partner. A month later, its Delaware holding company filed paperwork indicating it wanted to raise $25 million. The stated plan has been the same since 2016: kiosks first, then boutiques inside other retailers, then freestanding stores of its own. The freestanding stores have not arrived.
How did a barber's chair start Circuit City?
In 1949 Samuel Wurtzel, a New York importer, was on vacation in Richmond, Virginia, and went in for a haircut. The barber mentioned that the South's first commercial television station, WTVR, was about to go on the air in the city. Wurtzel worked out that people who could suddenly receive local broadcasts would need sets to watch them on.
He moved his family to Richmond and opened a store called Wards. The name was an acronym of the family: W for Wurtzel, A for his son Alan, R for his wife Ruth, D for his son David, and S for Samuel himself.
Alan Wurtzel took over as chief executive in 1972 and spent the decade building something larger than an appliance shop. The company pioneered the electronics superstore: a big showroom, deep inventory, and salespeople paid on commission who could walk a customer through the difference between two television sets. The format worked well enough that the chain took the Circuit City name in 1984 and spent the next fifteen years as the largest specialty electronics retailer in the United States.
Why did Best Buy pass Circuit City?
Best Buy introduced a format it called Concept II in 1989. It removed commissioned salespeople, moved the stock onto the sales floor, and let shoppers pull a box off the rack and carry it to the register. Suppliers disliked it. Shoppers did not.
Circuit City kept its commissioned floor staff, which was a real advantage for a decade and then became a cost line that Best Buy simply did not carry. The second decision was worse. In July 2000 Circuit City walked away from major appliances to free up floor space for small electronics. It had been the second-largest appliance retailer in the country in 1999, behind only Sears, with close to $1.6 billion in appliance sales that year. The housing boom that followed went to Home Depot, Lowe's and eventually Best Buy.
None of this looked fatal at the time. Jim Collins put Circuit City in "Good to Great" in 2001 as one of eleven companies that made the leap from good to great, noting that between 1982 and 1999 it delivered "cumulative stock returns 22 times better than the market." By fiscal 2008, Best Buy was reporting roughly $40 billion in revenue against Circuit City's $11.6 billion.
What happened when Circuit City fired 3,400 workers?
On March 28, 2007, Circuit City dismissed 3,400 store employees for being paid too much. Not the weakest performers: the highest earners, which in a commissioned environment meant the most experienced people on the floor, roughly 9 percent of an in-store workforce of about 40,000. They received severance and were told they could reapply after ten weeks at the lower market rate.
The company called it a wage management initiative. "All companies at one time or another need to go through and make sure their cost structure works with market conditions," spokesman Jim Babb told The Washington Post in 2007.
It did not work. By May 1, 2007, the same paper was reporting that analysts considered the cuts to be backfiring, with large flat-panel and projection televisions singled out as the products that needed knowledgeable staff to sell. Deutsche Bank analyst Mike Baker said the labor change had hurt service levels and allowed Best Buy to "take share." The one thing Circuit City had that Best Buy did not was the person on the floor who knew the answer, and the company had just walked that person out of the building.
When did Circuit City close its stores?
Philip Schoonover, chief executive since 2006, resigned in September 2008 with the company unsold and losing money. Board member James Marcum took over as acting chief executive. On November 3, 2008, Circuit City said it would close 155 stores and cut 17 percent of its workforce. Seven days later it filed for Chapter 11 in the US Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
No buyer materialized. On January 16, 2009, the court approved a full liquidation of the remaining 567 stores. "We are extremely disappointed by this outcome," Marcum said in a statement reported by CNNMoney that day. "We were unable to reach an agreement with our creditors and lenders to structure a going-concern transaction in the limited timeframe available."
The last stores turned off the lights on March 8, 2009, and about 34,000 jobs went with them. Congress held a hearing on it that year under the title "Circuit City Unplugged: Why Did Chapter 11 Fail to Save 34,000 Jobs?" The short answer was that a retailer whose vendors and lenders stop extending credit has nothing left to restructure. Fewer than two years separated the March 2007 layoffs from the last day of trading.
What is left of the chain in 2026?
In the United States, nothing operational. The stores were re-leased to other retailers, and the long low buildings with the red trim are still easy to spot in strip malls that have changed tenants twice since.
The Canadian side outlived the parent. InterTAN Canada ran the chain as The Source by Circuit City, and Bell Canada bought it as a going concern for C$135 million on July 1, 2009. Bell rebranded those stores as Best Buy Express in 2024, which means the last physical descendant of Circuit City now carries the name of the company that beat it.
The collapse was not unique, only fast. Fry's Electronics shut all 31 of its stores in 2021, and RadioShack went through two bankruptcies before ending up as a name licensed to other sellers. Circuit City got there first and got there hardest: the largest specialty electronics chain in America through the 1990s, with about 700 stores and $12.43 billion in net sales in fiscal 2007, and then nothing at all two years later.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did Circuit City go out of business?
Circuit City filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on November 10, 2008, and a court approved the liquidation of its remaining 567 US stores on January 16, 2009. The last Circuit City stores closed on March 8, 2009, ending about 34,000 jobs.
Is Circuit City coming back?
Circuit City has been an online-only brand since its relaunch in 2018, owned by Circuit City Corporation under Ronny Shmoel, who bought the name from Systemax in 2016. The company announced a shop-in-shop program called "Powered by Circuit City" in November 2023 with JCPenney as its first partner, but no freestanding Circuit City store has opened anywhere since the chain liquidated in 2009.
Why did Circuit City fail?
Circuit City lost ground to Best Buy after quitting major appliances in July 2000, then fired 3,400 of its highest-paid store staff on March 28, 2007, a cut that analysts told The Washington Post that May was backfiring. The credit crisis of 2008 finished a company that had already given away its main advantage, and Circuit City filed for bankruptcy that November.