Circuit City Lays off 3,400 Employees

Circuit City is laying off 3,400 of its highest paid employees. Probably not the CEO and a few other of the highest paid elite I'm sure. Even thought this move proves they should be the ones let go. A large portion of those employees were being paid higher wages because they have been with the company for a long time and know their field of sales well. They will be replaced by low salary low motivation workers for the most part. They will be unfamiliar with the technologies, and the only thing they will learn are the cheat sheets that have bulleted lists of features each product has. I can't think of a single worse move when customers biggest complaint about chain electronic stores is that the sales people aren't knowledgeable enough and are pushy.

On top of that Circuit City is setting a precedent that if you do well in the company by learning the products and earning yourself raises, you just might be working yourself out of a future job. So what incentive is there to do anything other than the bare minimum. The reason for the layoffs is supposedly to cut costs, but what kind of training costs will hiring 3,400 new employees be? Especially when the industry average employee turnover rate is 30%-50% already. So they will end up hiring closer to 5,000 employees and training them within the first year. There is no way to predict the impact this will have on customer satisfaction and rather they will continue to shop there or not with numbers, but I think we can all see this isn't a good move for cutting costs or increasing income.