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RadioShack Near Deal To Sell Half of Its Stores, Close the Rest
mrspoonsi sends a Bloomberg report about a possible endgame for RadioShack. The company will reportedly sell half its store leases to Sprint, and the remaining stores will simply close. Negotiations are still underway, and the deal could fall through — but as it stands, the stores still open will likely change to Sprint's branding.
Sprint and RadioShack also have discussed co-branding the stores, two of the people said. It’s also possible that another bidder could emerge that would buy RadioShack and keep it operating, the people said. The Chinese backers who took the Brookstone chain out of bankruptcy, Sanpower Group, also have been in discussions about bidding for RadioShack assets, one person familiar with the talks said. ... The discussions represent the endgame for a chain that traces its roots to 1921, when it began as a mail-order retailer for amateur ham-radio operators and maritime communications officers. It expanded into a wider range of electronics over the decades, and by the 1980s was seen as a destination for personal computers, gadgets and components that were hard to find elsewhere.
It's a shame, Radio Shack was so early in the PC game with the tape drives, 16KB of RAM, no hard drive, peek and pokes...they catered to the true tech junkies and with just a bit more business acumen, they could have ruled the computer world.
But then Commodore 64 came out with color and games, then came the the 8086 etc., but for a while the real eggheads knew how to play with the machine that looked like it came straight from the Star Trek bridge.
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I'll miss Radio Shack. Maybe not the "shack" itself but the time when it was relevant and one of the few places I could find esoteric parts I needed for some project or another.
At this point the only nod to their heritage is that some locations might have a dusty selection of parts(often still 'Tandy' branded and yellowing with age) hidden behind the iphone cases and overpriced consumer electronics.
... and marked up 500%. Last time I went there hoping to get a cable they wanted nearly $20 for it. Not a complex cable, just a bog standard 6 foot stereo audio cable. I ended up soldering one together from scraps but see now that Walmart has the same cable for $4. Next time I'll just go there first.
If you buy cables at Walmart you're paying too much. They usually have a good selection at the dollar store.
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Um... most folks can't remember that, because it never happened. Tandy bought Radio Shack in 1972, and then Radio Shack bought Allied Radio in 1970 and merged them. (Prior to that, Allied Radio had been a subsidiary of Columbia and a competitor to Radio Shack.) They were only briefly known as Allied Radio Shack, before Allied was spun off by court order and it subsequently died. On top of that, Allied pretty much followed the same path as Radio Shack - it started as a parts and components dealer, but by the 1960's it had long since become a consumer electronics dealer with a strong sideline in parts and components.
The reality is, Radio Shack hadn't been wholly dependent on the electronics hobbyist market since the 1930's - when it entered the hi-fi market. In 1954, the Realistic brand was introduced as it began to move into the more general consumer electronics market. By the early/mid 1970's, though the product mix varied by store (especially if your local store was independently owned), the transition company wide was largely complete - viewed as a whole they had become a consumer electronics store with a modest sideline in hobbyist parts and components. The advent of the personal computer was a decade away.
There are many causes to Radio Shack's decline and fall, but moving away from the electronics hobbyist market played no significant part.