$14,926,445

Perhaps they’ll drop some of their prices to help clear them of that debt? If they do, I won’t mind helping relieve them of their equipment debt 😀

More consumer chains likely to be hurt next year with big slump in sales. The makers better be careful with inventory and pushing shipments to dealers.

Yeah, but it is a Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which is very different that a Chapter 7. In Chapter 11, it is simply a reorganization of debt, not a release of debt. As long as they stay in Chapter 11, Nikon will get its money, it just might take a little longer than they agreed to. If they move on to Chapter 7, then we can starting talking about this.

I don’t get it. Circuit City is not known to be a big seller of Nikon, especially for their high priced items like pro level cameras and lenses. In other words, they sell a lot of D40/x/60 to D80s and some basic lenses. I can imagine they sell many more Canon 400D/450D in the DSLR section than anything else. On top of that, they sell tons of compacts which Canon and Sony has dominance. Why Nikon stuck with a 14 million dollar IOU but not Canon?

This is what Nikon gets for supporting crap chains like Circuit City instead of giving greater support to CAMERA stores.

Circuit City has been having financial difficulties for a long time. Nikon should have begun holding back stock, but I bet the sales people didn’t want to lose the sales volume. Sales people never care about the potential write-down – that’s just a financial and bookkeeping thing to them.

$14 million is nothing. With 1500 stores, that’s $9333 per store or about 18 $500 wholesale purchases per store. This could be one month’s worth of orders.

Nikon was probably already being careful.

As far as bargains are concerned, there usually aren’t any because people are idiots. They rush in and buy everything decent up at the first sale even though prices are still higher than the competitors. A true bargain for me would be 20% below what a J&R or B&H charges.

While this is a tough environment for all physical retail and even before the economy sunk, retailers like Circuit City were suffering because of the changing marketplace, poor music sales, disinterest in hi-fi, e-commerce, etc., this was an incredibly badly run operation in which once again, a series of vastly over-paid executives displayed complete incompetency and now 34,000 employees are going to suffer. But I guarantee you that the senior executives will all be very well compensated.

When will physical retail learn that in the age of e-commerce, you have to have value add? Circuit City had none. They purposely fired their most experienced employees, took away sales commissions (which is both a positive and a negative), had ugly stores in undesirable locations, not particularly great prices poor customer service, mostly poorly designed sales displays and boring stock. I was shopping in one once when the cash registers at both checkout lines (only two checkout lines in a 50,000 square ft store?) broke down and the cashiers and managers simply walked away and left us standing there. Another time they told me after I waited on a checkout line for 30 minutes, “oh sorry, this line doesn’t take credit cards.” This is not a recipe for success. I never shopped there again.