Financially challenged consumer electronics retailer Circuit City is selling off its Canadian stores to Bell Canada. Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed at this time.
My colleague Andy Patrizio has been writing about the Circuit City bankruptcy in the US, but we didn’t know what was going to happen to the Canadian operations.
Circuit City in Canada is an interesting entity for me. Technically the stores are called “The Source by Circuit City” and they are in locations that for most of my life were called Radio Shack. Circuit City bough out InterTAN Canada (the one time owner of the Radio Shack name) in May of 2004.
What’s interesting to me about this new deal is that in many of the malls where Radio Shack/The Source exist there is also often a Bell Canada retail store (Bell stores sell mobile phones, home phone service and Satellite TV). I wonder if they’ll now try and merge/consolidate those operations.
There are 750 ‘The Source’ stores in Canada, no word yet on how many will remain under Bell and whether or not the name will change.
I wonder if they’ll bring back the ‘battery’ club thing though…(you’d bring your card in to a Radio Shack Canada location and you’d get a free battery every month).
