Circuit City Liquidation: HD Buyer Beware

(From HD Notebook)

On Nov. 10, Circuit City filed for bankruptcy protection from its creditors. While the writing had been on the wall for quite a while for the nation's second-largest CE retailer (earlier it announced the closing of one-fifth of its stores and the subsequent loss of thousands of jobs), the Richmond, Va.-based company has now gone into liquidation mode.

While liquidation sales sometimes can provide opportunities for deep discounts and other seemingly unheard-of benefits, several tech Web sites and online bloggers are warning potential HD consumers to do their homework before making any major purchases at the Circuit City stores they visited. While it is not uncommon for chains in liquidation to not offer returns of any kind (which reportedly is the case with Circuit City), several observers report some of the chain's "sale prices" in liquidation are no lower than the competition—and may be higher in some cases than Circuit City's own price points before it filed for Chapter 11.

In a word (or three): HD buyer beware.