Two major CE retailers released news about how they're coping with the economic downtown, with Best Buy doing considerably better than Circuit City -- which might cease to exist before the month is out. Best Buy released its sales figures for the 2008 holiday season, and there was good news and bad news. According to the Financial Times, though December sales dropped 6.8% in U.S. stores, the retailer's overall business actually went up 4%. The company also said in its statement that its Web sales had grown 34% in the month of December. The segment which did the best was home office -- which actually went up year over year by 6.5% -- and the segment which did worst was appliances, which went down 24.5%. Some of this growth came, no doubt, at the expense of Circuit City, which announced just before the start of the holiday shopping season that it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, laying off 17% of its workforce, and actually closing 155 stores. The Financial Times said that Circuit City said in late December that its stores had seen comparable sales falls of 40 to 50% after it filed for bankruptcy. Circuit City also filed a motion on January 5 with the Bankruptcy Court that seeks approval of procedures that would formally put the company up for sale, as a going concern, as separate business units or as individual assets -- including the sale of inventory. The motion currently provides that an auction of the company and its assets would begin on January 13, and a sale hearing would occur on January 16.

The company said it had two "highly motivated and interested parties," which it did not name. However, several financial publications named a likely one to be Ricardo Salinas Pliego, a Mexican billionaire whose holdings include TV Azteca and the Grupo Elektra retail stores. He acquired a 28% stake in Circuit City around the time it filed for bankruptcy, and said in a regulatory filing that the stake could lead to him seeking to acquiring Circuit City assets. Best Buy, which had a voluntary layoff in December, also lowered earnings forecast for the fiscal year ending February 28 to $2.50-2.70, from $2.30-2.90 previously.