Jan. 17--Today's brutal economy has swallowed another household retail name.

Sixty-year-old Circuit City Stores Inc. starts liquidating today, leaving 34,000 employees without jobs and adding 567 vacant buildings to a growing list of empty retail storefronts.

Richmond, Va.-based Circuit City said Friday that it expects all stores to be closed by the end of March, including 15 in Dallas-Fort Worth.

A bankruptcy court approved Circuit City's liquidation Friday after the company couldn't find a buyer. The court approved the sale to liquidators Great American Group LLC, Hudson Capital Partners LLC, SB Capital Group LLC and Tiger Capital Group LLC.

Circuit City's sales peaked in 2006 at $12.4 billion.

The No. 2 spot used to be a safe one in retailing, but Circuit City, Linens 'n Things and KB Toys have proved otherwise over the past year.

The retailer's demise puts $6 billion to $9 billion in business up for grabs this year, said Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis for market research and industry tracking company NPD. "That's a lot of PCs and iPods for others to get."

Best Buy Co., the largest U.S. consumer electronics chain, may feel some pain from such a huge liquidation sale, but it is a long-term winner, analysts said. So are regional chains such as Beaumont-based Conn's, which posted strong holiday results amid a sea of weakness, and California-based Fry's. Fort Worth-based RadioShack is also likely to benefit, analysts said.

A year ago, Circuit City would have been able to reorganize, but consumer electronics companies face a double-whammy: the recession and a market category too price-driven today, Baker said. "All the product cycles are on a decline now. People have two or three of everything and are driven by price."

In addition, growing competition online from Amazon.com and others and from bigger consumer electronics departments at Wal-Mart, Target, Sam's and Costco has made the environment even tougher.

"Wal-Mart has been squarely focused on electronics, and that puts pressure on the specialty stores like Circuit City," said Alan P. Shor, president of Dallas-based The Retail Connection L.P. "Best Buy is a very good operator. Then the other big boxes --Target, Sam's and Costco -- put the death nail into Circuit City, which wasn't the best operator."

Management blamed

Consumer electronics retailers need to radically change the store experience, said Gilbert Fiorentino, chief executive officer of the technology products group at Systemax, parent company of CompUSA and TigerDirect. The company acquired 16 CompUSA stores from the defunct Dallas-based chain when it was liquidating a year ago, and Systemax operates one CompUSA store in Plano.

"Circuit City was just chasing Best Buy for a long time, and from the customer's point of view, they were homogeneous. If Best Buy can make money and Circuit City couldn't, the difference was management," Fiorentino said.

In the last few years, Tweeter and Ultimate Electronics have also closed stores.