Slashdot Mirror
Radio Shack Reported To Be Ready for Bankruptcy Filing
hij writes A number of news reports are coming out the Radio Shack is ready to file for bankruptcy. The stock price has tanked on Wall Street. There are conflicting reports that they are seeking more credit and they may be bought for their assets. (The Wall Street Journal has the story, but paywalled.)
I know the fashionable thing to do is to bash Radioshack, but there really isn't a brick and mortar that still sells components for tinkerers. If I needed a capacitor for a project, I could nip out and get one from the drawers. They haven't done well with consumer electronics since the Tandy days and I'm amazed they've lasted this long. It's sad to think that this great institution well probably go through a fire sale and disappear. Malls, what's left of them, will just replace it with something like Gap for Dogs or whatever. I know many may not mourn the loss because of things like $30 cables, but I will mourn the loss for the unique items they did carry.
When I was growing up. Used to be one of the few places you could go and buy electronics parts, and even leatherworking products. They had an excellent line of electronics instruction material, the Forrest Mims books were priceless. Was the place where I bought my first computer a TRS-80 Model 1
. The shame is that throughout the years they never seemed to know what they wanted to do. Later it seemed like a zombie corporation, where the people who had a passion for the products had left, and all that were left were bean counters being driven by the random lurching motion of retail fads.
Radioshack should have been the go to place for mini-dishes, unlocked cell phones, tv cables,etc
They instead got rid of the geeks who knew stuff and replaced them with the same type of perky clueless
people you would find in an at&t or t-mobile. Why would I buy the exact same cell phone and plan that I could
buy in a tmobile and at&t store. Radioshack never offered what the consumers really wanted
a good unlocked cell phone and our choice of prepaid plans.
Radioshack could still recover but they need to reduce the number of stores, expand its online offerings and make
deals with more competitive suppliers like monoprice. They also need to refocus radioshack back on customer
service with "friendly geeks" that help you with everything and provide honest unbiased advice which is so lacking right now.
My local RS still carries a lot of that stuff... they built organizer drawers so they could take up much less space than hanging bags on pegboard, but much was still available. Shame, because sometimes you just need a pack of resistors, or a small transformer, and you don't want to deal with shipping and credit cards for something that should cost $1.50.
I will say though, that I saw the writing on the wall when they started stocking cheap consumer electronics and the employees there didn't know where to find the resistors... at that point I'd just waive them off and say I'll find what I need myself... none of them knew anything about electronics anymore.
To see them die now is more of a relief than a sadness... they were dead 5 years ago.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
i don't think you need to follow their share price to figure out that a store that sells random crap and never seems to have anyone working there might not be doing so well.
But why now? Even back in the 1980s they were selling random overpriced crap, and there were rarely any customers in the stores. They were openly hostile to the few that ventured in, demanding name, address, and phone number for the privilege of buying a battery. Why is it only now, three decades later, that they are finally going under?
They could have "gone back to their roots" by dumping all the common electronics that you can get anywhere and addressing the do-it-yourselfers by hopping on the robotics/Arduino bandwagons. Turn the retail floorspace that used to be occupied by crap TV's with a robot combat ring or workshop, focus on hands-on projects again, have in-store Arduino workshops and local demos of user projects and robotics competitions. Connect with the local high/middle-school to supply robotics/coding extra-curriculars, sponsor robotics workshops and have those kids drag their parents into the store after class to build their own projects. I don't even participate in most of that stuff, but I could see those would have been great paths to pursue a new market share.
They would still need to close many locations and better compete with the mail order business, but they would have created a different customer segment that would be more enthusiastic than the "I need another charger for my phone" crowd rather than reduce their own business to carrion for the vultures. This was a missed opportunity.
"Now, I doubt any of you would prefer a rolled up newspaper as a weapon against a dictator or a criminal intruder."
You just nailed the fundamental problem with RS: the total lack of vision of what they wanted to be.
They followed the crest of every consumer wave for years, but missed the PC market by offering their not-100%-compatible boxes (software had to be written specifically for a RS PC because they did things like keyboards so differently). When it became obvious that the next wave was going to be build-it-yourself PC's, they were caught flat-footed and never caught up.
In Australia, they quickly dropped components, the "battery of the month" club and virtually everything else that might have set them apart and became nothing more than an expensive place to by mid range consumer electronics. History shows just how wrong that bet was, even in a small market like Australia.
It's a shame to see the brand go, but I said goodbye to Radio Shack sometime in the late 80's and never set foot in another store.
Story
So I found myself needing a 2N2222 the other day. I wanted it NOW I couldn't be bothered to wait 3 days for mouser.com to mail one two me. So I remembered that my friendly neighborhood radioshack carries all the components I need! I head down there and much to my chagrin all they sold anymore were extremely common A/V connectors, cables, and mobile phones by low paid high school kids. Where were to remote controlled airplanes/cars/boats, the CB's, misc electronic parts, knowledgeable sales staff with white scraggly neck beards? I didn't go there expecting to save a buck. No, I expected to pay 3+ times the price of getting it online somewhere. But I could have it NOW! Then I remembered I hadn't been into a radioshack in 10 years. *sigh* I'll miss you electronics parts store.
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
Radio Shack has tried to serve makers. It turns out, makers are among the people most comfortable shopping online.
I was in a RS recently and they had a 3D printer display, had a rack of Arduino kits, robotics stuff, and lots of little circuit toys for kids on display.
http://www.radioshack.com/diy-...
I needed some odd audio cables last year, so that I could patch an mp3 player into a PA system. I was thinking that I'd find crimp-on 1/8" ends, and make the cable myself.
I got to the store, and was having trouble finding what I wanted (I found solder-on, but the crimp-on slot was empty), so I thought I'd look at what cables that they had that I could cut up ... and they just happened to have a cable that was 1/8" to bare wires.
The year before, I got a bunch of various cables so that I could patch into a mixing board to record audio from a conference that I was at. I've had other times when I was outfitting a chase vehicle for a solar car race, and they had the parts that I needed to get all of our various antennas on the roof of the van.
So yes, it helps for those 'I really do need it now' situations. In some cases, Guitar Center might have it, but the closest one is more than an hour away, and they wouldn't have had the components to make the specific cable that I needed, and they sure wouldn't have had N-connectors and magnetic antenna mounts.
I hope they can turn it around ... I'd be willing to pay a membership fee just to have them around for when I really need a part.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Amazon Prime maybe?
Radio Shack has never been a good deal, but their over-inflated prices are usually still cheaper than ordering a single part+shipping. Plus it's it's generally been one of the few places you can go when you need a single random part *today*.
Today though you've got lots of stores with massive online catalogs that can be ordered with free shipping to the store, and places like Amazon that offer free or deeply discounted shipping to members and/or on fairly reasonable-sized orders (and offer a broad enough catalog that you can usually find other stuff you need anyway to pad out an order). As people increasingly make use of such alternatives, Radio Shack's customer base is shrinking to just those people that really want their widget NOW, and I imagine there's just not enough of such people to make a profit from.
Plus there's the demographic lag effect. Even today lots of people don't like doing business over the internet, but it tends to disproportionately be an older demographic that didn't have compelling options when they were younger and more open to alternatives. And that's a demographic that, for any given alternative, will only ever be shrinking.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Most of the ones I've been into in recent history, are more geared to being cell phone resellers. Trying to find actual electronic components are tough....and a sales person with knowledge of them even harder.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Radio Shack formally jumped the shark with the CueCat. Been heading downhill ever since.
Method of processing duck feet