Circuit City headquarters has ordered their stores to “destroy all copies” of the latest issue of Mad Magazine, according to an anonymous tipster. The retailer apparently isn’t amused by the 4-page spoof of “Sucker City.” Inside, Mad’s 1-page preview and headquarters’ response.
UPDATE: Circuit City Sorry For Commanding Employees To Destroy Mad Mag’s “Sucker City” Parody
The spoof:
The response:
What’s wrong Circuit City? It’s funny because it’s true!
Issue #492 [Mad Magazine]
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That parody ad is very funny indeed. Go Gang of Idiots Go!
@aristan:
True, unsold books/magazines have covers ripped off, but do you see anything in the memo to indicate that? I doubt any of the people in the store are going to do that much work, I would bet on just filling the dumpster with them.
I work at Circuit City, I have yet to see a single store that carries magazines? Maybe they just don’t exist in my area? We didn’t receive any such memo either.
Is Circuit City destroying magazines that make fun of them any different than, say, the Consumerist Comment Code prohibiting posts asking why this is on The Consumerist?
OK, so Circuit City isn’t showing much of a sense of humor, but I can understand that they would be reluctant to have stuff that makes fun of them in the store.
And I have to admit that I have a bit of a soft spot for Circuit City, for the simple reason that they are not Best Buy (and that they at least give BB a little competition).
So true about being across from BestBuy.
When I worked at Circuit Shitty we never carried magazines though.
Wow, I have to pick up the magazine, or at least the OTHER THREE PAGES. I haven’t laughed so hard all day.
This is common practice among retailers. I suspect there is some contractual agreement covering this, but I have no clue. I remember removing magazines from Staples when they had poor reviews of the store.
I’m getting myself a 2 year mad magazine subscription tomorrow just for this.
What, them worry?
This is right on point. Just today I was looking through one of their shoppers. They were selling a 512MB SDRAM card for desktops at $29.99 and that was their sale price. Regular price was $54.99. To give you an idea of how off this is, nowadays laptop ram that’s twice as fast and twice in capacity (1GB) costs about the same or less than the sale price. Laptop ram is always more expensive too. RIP OFF
@dumblonde: It was probably DDR1 SDRAM which is fairly rare and getting pretty expensive…
Not to stick up for Circuit City but DDR1 is creeping up everywhere..
Hilarious! Although 4299 for a 96″ 1080p LCD ain’t too shabby.
Normal corporate response.
I have seen companies pull their advertising from their ad agency just because of poor ad placement in a single magazine, the typical corporate response to a negative article is always far worse.
The flip side, I just love the reference to Best Buy. IN my town BB is building a new store on the main mall entrance road to CC… one can’t get to CC without passing BB.
If this isn’t an act of desperation from a dying company, I don’t know what is.
@aristan: Thanks for the explanation. I get that they CAN do it. But only b/c the publisher assumes that unsold = nonpurchased copies, not vandalized by the store’s. But if a fairly high exec sends a priority email publicly (now, thanks to Consumerist – AWEsome!), can’t Mad, Inc twist the knife in by citing the email, then saying, “Prove the copies you HAVEN’T shredded – you owe us the balance.”
Were I representing CC’s PR efforts, I’d have returned them, not shredded them, chortling publicly about how we won’t get caught. It seems they’re opening themselves for quite reasonable claims from Mad Inc demanding they prove the unsold copies were in fact, unsold.
Which would be a great comeuppance. Genuinely, a Steisand Effect writ large.
@DeafLEGO:
“Being an avid MAD Magazine reader”
I think you mean “the,” not “an.”
I can see this is cause for concern. After making so many customers wait 24 minutes for the online order IN the store… they need something to look at to kill the time.
What’s worse… is that MAD isn’t really picking on Best Buy… what gives!
What? MAD is no longer 35 cents?
Not cheap.
I love that they’re both located on Elm St. Too bad Freddy wasn’t involved in this.
Magazines in a Circuit City? The only reading you should be doing there are the crappy signs, and the outrageous prices that’ll make your eyes bulge.
hehe i used to run a back room comic simeler to this.
Welcome to Circuit Shitty Where Sevice is state of the FART.
did most of it in printshop but allways gave folks a good laugh.
pissed off the managers cus it mainly made fun of them ;p
@humorbot: I don’t know, but this looks like classic MAD to me. It made my day when I saw it.
Now, if they’d dare do a Walmart* flyer like that…
Seriously, when did everyone lose their sense of humor. I’d have a copy of the page on every employee bulletin board in the company. Of course, if I ran Sucker City, we wouldn’t be ludicrously inept enough for MAD to lampoon, and we’d be looking at at Worst Buy lampoon ad instead.
Now, now… the directly across the street isn’t _quite_ right; Syracuse, NY’s Circuit City is one floor below Syracuse’s Best Buy (in a mall)…
I think there’s a strong possibility the suit who wrote that message is not aware that Circuit City does not sell magazines.
@weave:
Mad was only 25¢ when I started buying it.
The only thing that would make this PR blunder more entertaining would be if some environmentalist group got ahold of this story 1) CC is advising its stores to THROW AWAY the magazines (not recycle them), and 2) they are throwing them away before anyone could read them therefore wasting the resources (paper, ink, electricity and fuel) that it took to create them (before any benefit could be obtained from them) which makes the situation almost as bad as cutting down old growth trees, shredding them, and placing the wood chips in non-biodegradable containers and throwing them in a landfill…100% wasteful!
@lorddave:
Standard operating procedure for any store interested in protecting their brand?
I don’t blame Circuit for doing this. They don’t need any more hits to their legitimacy, and this is just the sort of thing that really does stay in people’s minds.
Also, it could just be to avoid financially supporting MAD magazine, who is biting one of the hands that feeds them.
Hey Circuit City,
lolumad?
I don’t think I have ever seen magazines at Circuit City.
I don’t this email sounds fake.
err, I don’t think this email is genuine..sorry.
@cubensis: That was my first reaction to this. For a second I pictured groups of rogue Circuit City employees running into stores armed with torches and paper shredders.
@EricaKane
I dont this email sounds fake too
@EmperorOfCanada:
I worked at store 0422 and we were in the first wave of layoffs. And we were still using that system that you see in the photo.
I worked there for a long time, but I had never seen mad magazine there.
Is nobody else concerned that a supposed “technology company” is using pine/elm as their e-mail client? or am I dating myself by even acknowledging I know what those programs are?
I had been under the impression for years now that Circuit City didn’t care about their public image, due to their behavior in general.
They tried to change the strategy in my area and open one across the street from a Nebraska Furniture Mart 10 years ago. It was only open a few years.
Look at their shitty terminal-based email client…not what I would expect from a “tech” company.
@Underpants Gnome:
Hey, I remember Pine. My first year of college we used Pine/telnet for our email. This was ’98-’99…
I’m seriously tempted to take a copy of this into a Circuit City store and demand a Shiitake 96″ TV for $4300 just to see what the reaction is.
I still swear by circit city… the one on 5th ave in NYC is the greatest…. it is right next to a best buy… not even accross the street…. RIGHT NEXT DOOR
@Underpants Gnome:
Wow we used that when I was in college….back in 93.
@humorbot:
It’s not that they stopped printing funny stuff. They just tend to appeal to teenagers. Go back and reread issues you found to be rolling-on-the-floor hilarious at 14-15 years old. They won’t be quite so funny now you’re older…
@Ben Popken: Same here. My local Circut City actually picked up and moved to the next town over just to be across the street from Best Buy. This struck me as the most unnecessary move I’d ever seen.
OMG that is the funniest thing i’ve seen in a LONG time
@rodeo40: If you look carefully at the point-of-sale software in most stores you’ll find it’s usually quite ancient. Fry’s, for example, has some text-based system they run in terminal emulators. A bank I worked at in 1995 was still using a text-based Unisys mainframe system. Businesses are conservative, and if they’ve put a lot of money into developing a system that works for them they’re not going to ditch it just because it’s old.
@Orv
If it works, don’t fix/replace it. Newer doesn’t always mean better. Look at Vista.
At any rate, It’s a joke. I’m surprised that CC is making a big deal about this.
I don’t frequent CC any more, ever since they laid off a mass amount of experienced employees who might have actually been making a living wage, and replaced them with minimum-wage folks who don’t know a thing about the products.
On one hand, Circuit City show a distinct humour failure by requesting the magazines are shedded. On the other hand, Mad’s writers seem to have suffered a catastrophic humour failure of their own, so I dare say CC comes out on top.
@Jesse: There’s got to be a good joke there about how CC sucks so bad, even a furniture store sold more TVs than they do.
@HurtsSoGood: I suppose that the PR person simply took this one “seriously,” I mean personally. Probably a really bad hotheaded move. I never would have even known this existed without this publicity. Of course, I pretty much say the same things to myself when I read a CC advert. “Sale price? That’s the regular price! New game? That was out a month ago! Need a map? Why, I can just look for the Best Buy (or Costco) across the street!”
@goodkitty:
Nebraska Furniture Mart (NFM) is a huge retailer in the region. Unlike the big box retailer’s relatively static pricing model, NFM will deal with you. Part of that is because they employ traditional salespeople. Also, their financing deals often blow Best Buy out of the water.
The downside though is NFM’s credit card is secured credit, which means they can seize the asset if you default. Also, they are higher up on the creditor foodchain if you go into bankruptcy.
Three words:
“Lurch and Seizure”
LOL!!!!!!!!