Oh, Circuit City. What will we do when we don't have you to kick around anymore?
If you've been following CtW Connect since the beginning, you'll remember how a little more than a year ago they made the stunningly boneheaded decision to fire 4,300 3,400 [ Typo -- ed. ] of their best workers in order to replace them with cheaper labor. And how that predictably led to a sales slump so dramatic that Fortune magazine included the decision in its list of the 101 dumbest business moves of 2007. And how that led the company to try to reinvent itself by staffing its sales floors with teenagers clad head to toe in black, spouting mantras like "keep it real" -- which, also predictably, didn't exactly turn things around.
Well, now it looks like CC management have (after driving their stock down from $20/share to five and a quarter) decided to throw in the towel -- word is that they have retained Goldman Sachs to broker a sale of the company to some third party, most likely Blockbuster Video.
Of course, since Blockbuster has not exactly been burning up the stock exchanges over the past few years itself (thanks to the video rental business being decimated by the Internet, cheap DVD prices, and Netflix), having to be bailed out by them may just be one last way for the universe to smack Circuit City's management around before they shuffle off to ruin some other business.
UPDATE (May 13): The Onion explains Blockbuster's sagging fortunes better than I can: