The Tragic Collapse of American Electronics Retail: Circuit City, Crazy Eddie & Sharper Image

Three American electronics retailers, three completely different ways to destroy yourself. Circuit City was founded in 1949 by a man who worked out from a barber's chair that a city about to get its first television tower would need televisions, and he named the company after his wife and children. It invented the electronics superstore and for five straight years returned more to investors than any company on the New York Stock Exchange. Then it fired the people who knew what they were talking about — twice, without testing it, from a script, at eight-fifteen in the morning. Crazy Eddie was a criminal enterprise for eighteen years, and it did not come apart because of auditors or regulators; it came apart because Eddie Antar got divorced and fired his own family. He fled to Israel on a Brazilian passport with fifty million dollars and came back in handcuffs. And The Sharper Image sued Consumer Reports for reporting that its best-selling product did not work, lost, paid their legal costs, and then compensated three million customers at nineteen dollars a head in vouchers for its own store. Nobody went to prison for two of the three. The one that killed the most careers broke no laws at all.