Turns out firing all your experienced sales people doesn’t work out so well in the end as a business model. At least it didn’t for Circuit City.
Americans put up with a remarkable amount of shitty service, but even we have limits. The free market works well when it comes to discretionary items in sectors with numerous competitors. You don’t like a store, you don’t go back.
Not as simple, of course, when it comes to things like Enron. Hard to shop around for electricity during brownouts caused by criminals. This key difference is often overlooked by conservatives touting free market solutions to every last damn thing. Consumer choice in cheap and mid-priced electronics? Great! Handing Social Security funds over to Wall Street? Not great.