In 1969, Eddie, along with his father Sam M. Antar and his cousin Ronnie Gindi, started an electronics retailer store in Brooklyn, NY, which operated under the name “ Sights and Sounds.” Up until 1971, when Eddie bought his cousin’s share, they each owned a third of the company. In 1984, Eddie and his father took the company public and the increased the number of stores to its peak of a total of 43 stores. Although everything looked great from the outside, Crazy Eddie used many schemes to defraud his customers, auditors and investors in the inside. Crazy Eddie filed phony insurance and warranty claims, receiving money for merchandise that was in perfect condition. He also was skimming, had fictitious revenues and accounts. Crazy Eddie instructed retailers to provide payments in increments of $10,000 …show more content…
If you were not part of the family, you were not allowed to work there. After all, all of his schemes had to stay in a tight knit circle. His employees were okay with that because Eddie gave them great incentives to keep everything a secret. They were often rewarded with great pay and a very generous bonus at the end of the year. Crazy Eddie had an interesting business model. He adapted his business model from skimming as a private company, to inflating profits as a public company. Eddie Antar inspired great loyalty from his workers. He put it as, “Us against the world.”, meaning, his employees and him against everyone else who had the capacity to bring him down. For a sales model, he used the “ Bait and Switch” approach, which proved to be very effective for the sales in the company. Before a customer would leave, he would have three different employees approach them, in order to convince them to buy higher profit margin merchandise after being baited into the stores by our "beat any price" policy. Often times, they did. Crazy Eddie also sold used and defective merchandise as brand new