free variable

When Circuit City existed as an actual, physical retailer I thought they offered a surprisingly good online shopping experience. You could go to their site, check to see if something was in stock in your local store, and, if it was, pay for it online and pick it up from the front desk in about the time it would take you to drive there. (This was and probably still is vastly superior to the Best Buy experience, where purchasing something for in-store pickup means “within 24 hours or so” rather than “within 20 minutes.”) The workflow combined the best parts of shopping in person (immediate gratification) and shopping online (searching via a text box from one’s desk, rather than hunting around physical stores).

However, after Circuit City was liquidated, some company bought their trademarks and applied them to a fairly generic e-commerce site. Apparently, the fairly generic e-commerce site was also able to purchase customer lists, because I’ve been getting spam from them fairly regularly. Since the new circuitcity.com doesn’t allow me to purchase something, drive six miles away, and pick it up in the same hour, it is not significantly more compelling than Amazon Prime; in any case, I’m not particularly interested in “hot deals” on mediocre computer hardware, which seem to be the bulk of circuitcity.com’s current offerings.

My experience in trying to unsubscribe from these mailing lists — and I had been added to several, apparently — bodes poorly for the usability of the “new” circuitcity.com, especially in light of how nice the old one was. The first problem was the “unsubscribe” notification at the bottom of one of the messages, which I have included below:

Not only does this (or “th is,” perhaps?) appear in a larger block of text that recalls every nearly-plausible phishing email I’ve ever received, the address is misspelled: “circuitcity-oline.com” isn’t a real domain. So my first attempt at unsubscribing bounced. Fortunately, this was fairly easy to correct: I sent a blank email to the appropriate address at “circuitcity-online.com,” and was on my way. Or was I?

(Do note that I had sent a blank message — one without the word “subscribe” in it anywhere. Also note that “circuit-city-master-unsub” is an awfully strange name for a list.)

On the third try, I was able to unsubscribe, as far as I can tell. (I’m actually not sure whether or not “leaving” the “master-unsub” list will cause me to get additional mail.) A more cynical observer might conclude that circuitcity.com has very little incentive to make it easy for me to opt out of further advertising, but this seems more like garden-variety incompetence to me. (Although I’m not particularly interested in entrusting my payment details to businesses who can’t manage their most basic computing infrastructure.)

It is, however, a little sad that the retailer who used to have my commodity consumer electronics ready within twenty minutes has given its name to a pedestrian “hot deals” list that requires twenty minutes of effort to leave.