Printer Friendly Forum Posts - what happened to roadshop?

yup. Its circuit city's new way of combining all of its services. I will personally always call it the roadshop outside the store, but its their new thing. And as for your comment haemphyst.... not all of us are as "high quality" as you think. There are some of us who actually care about the installs we do enough to do them correctly. Every car I do, my #1 goal is to have dealerships actually tell my customer that their vehicle problem was NOT caused by the starter/radio/etc because it WAS installed properly (which has actually happened twice believe it or not). And the poor installers out there shouldnt reflect directly on all of us.

/end rant

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Kenny
Owner / Technician
KKD Garage LLC
Albany, NY 12205

Apparently, you missed the dripping sarcasm. I'll try to lay it on a bit thicker, next time! posted_image

I agree, there are probably more than a few installers like yourself, working for Circuit City and caring about the quality of your installations, but I can assure you that you are in the minority. I have gutted more Circuit City installs to start over than I care to count.

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It all reminds me of something that Molière once said to Guy de Maupassant at a café in Vienna: "That's nice. You should write it down."

Man I'm a CC installer myself, it sucks hearing that, but I believe you, I'm sure its true, I have seen a couple just in my store alone, luckily they are gone though

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It Hz

oh i agree its true... i just cant stand it because it kills the reputation of us few good installers. Granted, Im not the best, and I dont think I will ever be, but i do take pride in what I do.

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Kenny
Owner / Technician
KKD Garage LLC
Albany, NY 12205

I think it is a problem that the people who don't care about their job always make it more difficult on the ones who do, no matter what field your in.

up untill about a month ago i was a supervisor for roadshop.

you probably wont find anyone to call it firedog car or mobile firedog like they wanted us to for at least a year.

cant think of a single person associated with the new deceased roadshop who was happy about the name change. but in reality, no one was able to recognize who roadshop was associated with. when corporate did a survey i think less than 10% of people knew what roadshop was or where to get it.

its actually a pretty smart move, but it just sounds dumb

I'm a former Roadshop employee myself and I would put my knowledge/ability up against almost any 'ma and pa' installer.

I'm not saying I am/was the perfect installer, but I know my way around cars and electronics and I am a self-motivated perfectionist!

Sadly, though. like mentioned above, I worked side by side with people who had no business operating a screw driver!

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Kevin Pierson

KPierson wrote:

I'm a former Roadshop employee myself and I would put my knowledge/ability up against almost any 'ma and pa' installer.
I'm not saying I am/was the perfect installer, but I know my way around cars and electronics and I am a self-motivated perfectionist!
Sadly, though. like mentioned above, I worked side by side with people who had no business operating a screw driver!

ill just go ahead and say how the hiring process goes for installers alot of the time. as you could have guessed. you dont need to know anything about cars at all. as long as your availability is okay and youre not a convicted felon, you can get the job. so theres plenty of morons out there, just like at best buy

but there are also people with incredible talent in the big box stores too. one of the kids we hired in had stunning fabrication skills (check some of his stuff out at bangnaudio.com) and also if you work there long enough, you just know everything. but also, there are people who work there for years and cant figure out how to re-wire a monsoon system in a grand am...

I got hired many years ago, and the process was much harder. They played games with me for a few weeks. Go talk to this manager here, go talk to this guy there. One time I showed up to interview (5 minutes early of course) and the manager had me wait for 15 mintues then sent me home because he didn't have time to talk to me.

Then, one of the managers asked me if I had any work done to my car so I popped my trunk. He was impressed and I finally got a job offer.

However, before they offered me the job they made sure I knew that I had approximately 6 weeks to have a full set of tools.

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Kevin Pierson

I am still under the belief that CC and Best Buys will be out of the car audio business in 5 years or less. You can hire all the Mobile Dynamics trained kids you want, but they don't know the cars. Mistakes will be made, repairs will be paid for. Margins will disappear. Corporate will pull the plug. Kevin Pierson, don't take this personally, I've been reading your posts, you know your stuff.

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There is no such thing as free installation!

They will still maintain a high profit margin though with their purchase power.

I remember a few years back we were selling DEI remote starts (552T I believe) for cheaper then one local shop could purchase them from DEI. That makes it very hard for small shops to compete.

For the record, I completely disagree with the way Circuit City runs their business. I don't agree with letting the experianced people go so they can save labor dollars. If anything, in the long run this will be their downfall.

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Kevin Pierson

I played the corporate game with Jerk-it for almost 3 years. One thing I can say is that I went through a lot of cars in those 3 years, anything from a rusted-out Festiva to a brand new 7 series BMW. Granted, never even thought about doing custom work, and if there was anything wrong with the car, we were told to leave it alone. I work for a small company now, and it really is so much nicer to have a family feel compared to the corporate engine driving down your back. Losing the Roadshop name and all the changes they put in place with the management structure just kind of did it in for me. An installer really has no where to go when trying to move up the ladder, unless you wanted to do computers, sales, and customer service along with installing. Not my cup of tea.

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95 Mazda 626
Pioneer DEH-P960MP
DEI Stilleto
Boston Acoustic SL60 Front
Boston Acoustic S85 Rear
Alpine V12 MRV-F407
Alpine V12 MRV-T757
2 Rockford Fosgate P2D412
Python 990 Alarm/RemStart

I work at the "foredog car" in FLint...We most certainly do NOT call it the that! No one has any association with the name. And tcss's comment about not having a CC car stereos...We won't have a CC car stereo because there won't be a CC! Anyone look at our stocks??? Sweet moves, Corporate office!

It's sad. I worked at the CC Fresno store at the peak of it's life. We were #1 or #2 in the company battling with the Hawaii store. And till this day I still have pride in the job we did and the crew we had. What erks me is these entry level positions have the capability to shape the careers of people who are new to the industry. And it sucks that corporate doesn't care about that.

The other thing that I have a problem with is that CC, BB. have alot of marketing power. If they promoted the 12v industry like they did before, just imagine how the intrest in car electronics would effect all our business.

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Tell the Snap-On guy I'm not here!

I ran the #1 rs garage (assit S&I)in district till a couple months ago, with the firing of the top paided people in may, the firing of most s&i s in the nation the idiots at corp started the demise of the roadshop. when i was promoted??( take postion or quit) to isup i had to not only run my garage but the sales floor also and do open close procedures, mod, floor manger, 288 and everthing else the sales mng had to do. i saw numbers start to drop then thay slashed hours no OT no cust service.have seen the numbers since i left and have talked to people still there they cant even hit 75% budget because there are NO customers in the store anymore, CC and RS are going down the hill on the way to hell

Man to do I have to agree with you guys about CC making the wrong moves. We have a good team as far as installers go with taking pride in each and every individual install we do. What's screwing us up the most is this new ISCE sales floor tactics that they have going on. You can't have just anyone sell car audio unless there into it or passionate about it.

i also agree 100%. I am currently the install supervisor at the Albany, NY store, and our amount of customers has definately taken a huge fall. In my heart it will always be roadshop.. lol. I take pride in my work, and I am just hoping that we stick around for a little longer til I can get some money together to open up my own stereo shop (we'll see how that goes). But the corporate offices are definately making some really bad decisions.

Just my .02

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Kenny
Owner / Technician
KKD Garage LLC
Albany, NY 12205