A year and a half ago, as markets hit new lows and the American spending machine temporarily shut down, hggregg went on a buying binge.

The Great Recession had left manufacturers with far more big-screen TVs and washing machines than they could sell. The Indianapolis-based electronics chain was happy to buy the surplus. The low prices it paid enabled it to boost profit margins even near the bottom of a severe economic slump.

Now the company is trying the same idea with stores. It's locking up retail space at doorbuster prices, including former Circuit City stores in metro Baltimore, in the hope that consumer spending will come back. It's opening dozens of stores from Washington to Philadelphia and beyond.

"Now is the time to lease if you have the guts," says Elizabeth Norton, who follows Baltimore and Washington real estate for research firm Delta Associates. "And the money."

Needless to say, hhgregg's expansion during the worst consumer slump in three decades is far from a sure bet. It is, however, an encouraging example of optimism, investment and American risk-taking at a time when all three are in short supply.

Circuit City is barely a year dead, but hhgregg has stepped into essentially the same business in many of the same stores. Public stock investors have fronted millions. Hundreds of people are being hired to renovate vacant stores and run them. A dozen analysts have "buy" or "outperform" ratings on the company. The stock is up 17 percent this year.

You could almost pretend it was 1997 — except for national unemployment of close to 10 percent.

"We have a very positive long-term outlook for this company," says Bradley Thomas, who follows hhgregg's stock for KeyBanc Capital in New York. "We think it's the regional player that's most likely to go national and most likely to fill the role that Circuit City struggled with as the No. 2 electronics retailer next to Best Buy."

But Best Buy squashed Circuit City, you're thinking. Circuit City went bankrupt and disappeared. Selling consumer electronics is a glamorous way to make very little money, and that's if you're lucky. You fight Internet merchants on one side and Walmart and Costco and Sears on the other.

How is there possibly room for another national TV seller when consumer spending is barely back to 2008 levels and Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman, writing in The New York Times, says we're in for a "third depression"?

Hhgregg has its reasons.

It's not trying to mimic Best Buy, something that Circuit City was often accused of. It's not wasting time or floor space selling music CDs, for example. It's emphasizing big TVs, washers, dryers and other large, expensive things that people can't buy over the Internet. There's even a mattress section.

The company is trying to expand in places such as Baltimore and Washington, where incomes are relatively high and unemployment is lower.

Dennis May, hhgregg's chief executive, expects a boost from the next generation of televisions — "LED backlight" screens based on light-emitting diodes, three-dimensional TVs and TVs receiving feeds from Internet sites such as Hulu.com.

"The ultra-thin LED displays are making people rethink what flat and flat-panel TV means," he told analysts on a conference call a month ago. Hhgregg's employees, which the chain claims are better trained than those in other stores, will sort it all out for the customer, he said.

Perhaps.

But hhgregg still doesn't have close to the buying power — and ability to drive down wholesale prices — that Best Buy or Walmart possess. It seems to be missing the boom in smart-phone sales, for instance. At some point, you can expect Best Buy to squeeze hhgregg by sharply cutting prices in places where both compete. That's a game that Best Buy chairman and founder Richard M. Schulze knows how to play very well.

Then there's that economy. As the country struggles to add jobs, as consumers and government dig out from mountains of debt, perhaps no other retailer is expanding as aggressively as hhgregg. Its success or failure will ultimately depend on whether the nation can put the Great Recession behind it for good.

In turn, the more companies there are like hhgregg that are willing to take calculated risks, deploy capital and hire Americans, the sooner that is likely to happen.