Circuit City is closing down all stores! They opened up the doors yesterday (Saturday) for their "big" liquidation sale, figuring there could be some great deals, I arrived around noon. But man, was I disappointed! Most of the items carry only a 10% discount, come on, that barely covers the sales taxes. I examine a few items I was interested in, and even with the 10% off, and not taking any taxes into consideration, each and everyone of them would be cheaper buying on-line. And I only checked one on-line retailer, Amazon.

There are two exceptions here:

• All cables are 30% off, which can turn out to be a good deal on some higher end cable. I ended up buying a 7ft Monster 800HD HDMI cable for about $60, which at least seemed like a decent deal (it was listed at $80 on amazon).
• All DVDs are 20% off. This can become a reasonable deal, but I'd still check every DVD against Amazon (or other on-line retailers) before buying them. I ended up buying the 30th Anniversary Blazing Saddles DVD, for $8.

The checkout lines were huge, and some people were stockpiling on all sort of expensive computer and A/V gear, neither of which carried any particularly good prices. I don't know why people wouldn't do at least a little background checks on an item, instead they all assumed it must be a good deal, because it's a liquidation sale.

To make things worse, all discounts were added on manually, and I actually had to remind the cashier that my items (I bought two things) both should have discounted prices (20% and 30% respectively). I can only assume a number of people didn't even get any discounts at all, which seems borderline criminal. I'd definitely recommend anyone to check their receipts when they get home, and go back and demand the discount if you didn't get it.

To my major disappointment, Yahoo just told me (less than a month before my domain is up for renewal) that they are increasing their prices for domain registration from $9.95/yr (I think) to a whopping $34.95/yr. Fortunately my ISP / hosted server provider (Cari.net) handles domain transfers very nicely, and at a reasonable price ($12/yr). Maybe not the cheapest alternative, but certainly better than $34.95.