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Radioshack Declares Bankruptcy
gemtech writes RadioShack has declared bankruptcy today. As reported Monday, the company has struck a deal to sell up to 2,400 of its approximately 4,000 stores to Sprint. From the article: "RadioShack said the remaining stores are expected to close. The company's franchise locations, as well as stores in Mexico and Asia, are not included in the deal. The bankruptcy announcement is no surprise. The New York Stock Exchange suspended trading of its shares on Monday. And RadioShack workers have told CNNMoney that some locations have already been converted to clearance stores."
So you have a bunch of stores for sale in tech-sector-friendly locations, just when Amazon is starting to establish a physical presence... Hmm.
That's what happens when nobody builds or repairs anything anymore ever. Throw it away, buy a new one. Luckily the corporate consumerists haven't adopted the same strategy yet, or we'd be seeing massive layoffs and turnover.
they probably still want your name, address, and phone number in the clearance store
Goodbye old friend.
Although, I thought you had died years ago.
Several years ago they were bought by Bell and re-branded as The Source. They still operate in Canada.
I wonder why they were able to survive in Canada and not in the US?
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
I stopped shopping there long ago because they stopped stocking anything useful. I don't need a cellphone from them, I needed parts, which they no longer carry.
Different management team.
A management team capable of eating a salad without stabbing themselves in the eye?
Indeed. Often, the failure of companies is simply due to bad management or sometimes cooking the books.
I saw this day coming after I worked there for a period. Treating their employees poorly was part of their business plan. I am surprised that it took so long though. Kornfield isn't around to see this, but he must have seen it on the horizon as well.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
They stopped carrying what their original customer base wanted. Tandy disappeared, Dick Smiths has got even worse and I don't know how they are still going.
But then JayCar came along. Picked up all of their old customer base and have been making a killing ever since. Jaycar's buzz line is "Better. More Technical" you can go in there an they have bins of components - Love that shop - http://www.jaycar.com.au/
And I suppose monoprice.com are greedy for selling me a 2 dollars cable when the same one only cost 50 cents on eBay shipping included?
Monoprice, however, sent me six replacement cables for free (including shipping) when I emailed them that the five I bought had failed in the last three years.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Before cell phones, before the internet, before computers... heck before REMOTE CONTROLS FOR YOUR TEEVEE!
Radio Shack was THE place for geeks to hang out. Kinda like a micro-Fry's in every mall. My dad swore by the Realistic stereos (I never did but when the only other alternatives at the time were Sears or JCPenney's for stereo receivers... They held up pretty well.) I cut my teeth on a TRS-80 Model 1 (Of course I promptly pooh-poohed it for the TRS-80 Model II because it's still true that geeks don't handle obsolescence well! Christmas was asking for the 150 electronics project kits or other gadgets.
Sure, it sucks now and we don't seem to live in a time where people play with electronics or chemistry sets anymore but a time where people are content to watch what the kardashians are up to and re-tweeting it on their phones because, gosh darn it, math is hard.
And now I watch as Radio Shack sells off to the Undying Lands. It's better this way anyway, it was a lousy cell phone store and the last time I went in there to buy a pair of speaker stands, to match the set I had purchased in that store 5 years earlier, I was told by the new kid manager that they don't have *and never sold* speaker stands.
yah... Fare thee well...
NOW GET OFFA MY LAWN!!!!
One of my first jobs was getting on a old Model 16 that had been upgraded to a Model 6000 (a whopping 1mb of RAM), with two 20mb hard drives, and five or six dumb terminals. We actually used the Radio Shack multi-user accounting software and worked on multi-department accounting. Did the job nicely, actually, and it's how I got my training as a sysadmin/bookkeeper/manager. I inherited the beast when the company closed down and I monkeyed around with it for a while; got a Usenet and email feed going via UUCP. In the end the 8" floppy drive crapped out, so I gave it to a friend of mine who got things up and running again and had a private BBS running for a few years.
Tandy made some reasonably decent hardware. The 16/6000 was quite a machine: M68000 processor, Z80 coprocessor that could run CP/M, but under Xenix basically took care of all the I/O.
I also had an MC10 a CoCo, CoCo 2 and a CoCo 3 (though I never upgraded the latter to 512k). Played around a lot in OS/2 and wrote an accounting program in BASIC-09 (which was a dialect that felt like a mix of BASIC, Pascal and COBOL). But in the end the PC one the computer wars, I went out and bought a 486, switched between Linux and Windows 3.1, and my old equipment finally got chucked during my last move about eight years ago.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
In all fairness, when you get an Arduino from Radio Shack, you are getting a REAL Arduino, and some money goes to support the project. When you buy from China, you are getting a clone and, while it works, the Arduino project (that makes the software) gets not a penny. I am not against clones, but I like to buy an original every now and then to help support the project.
Or, you could buy a clone and donate $5 to the project to help support development.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
Hey, A one eyed manager in a kingdom of blind managers is CEO.
A shame. I was just starting to think it was making a modest return to its roots.
When I visited one a few months ago, they had quite a decent little display of Makershed Arduino kits and books about the Arduino, and they had a kind of dense metal cabinet with shallow drawers filled with individual parts, a much larger selection than they used to have hanging on pegs in blister packs.
I needed a new soldering iron and I bought one there.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Frys or Microcenter, or even NewEgg.
Prime thing, though, they need to offer a small selection of electronics.
RadioShack dabbled in Enthusiast PC hardware, but gave up on it. I found them to be fairly priced for getting stuff I needed "now"
The business model needs to change, but RS was unwilling to be more than just another wireless retailer with a few toys and electronics added in the mix. If you have a B&M footprint, you have to give consumers a reason to come in. Providing goods that people usually can't wait for 3 days to get, or offering some sort of technical training for all the new tech, as well as easier returns (or pickup) for mail order goods is a start.
Maybe a "tech of the month" display to show people what they won't see at Best Buy or Walmart, but can order through a kiosk on site after checking it out. Many consumers still like the personal treatment when buying big ticket items, but they don't like paying a premium, or dealing with clueless stockers when they have a question.
Many years ago (like late 70's, early 80's) Radio shack was a place you could walk into, browse electronic components, and talk to and meet knowledgeable people to help with home brew projects. Then they expanded like hell, employed stupid corporate business policies like charging people to pay for store catalogs, ridiculous "i need all your personal info" so I can sell you a resistor, etc.
Haven't been in one of their stores in probably 20 years, surprised that it took that long for them to fail. In retrospect, they were so poorly managed, they weren't even good at failure.
Good riddance (and yes, I'm still pissed about the time you assholes tried to charge me money to send me a catalog of your stuff!!)
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
I remember typing in page after page of some game programmed in basic, as found in some magazine, and then running out of memory with just a half a page left.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
The Internet is killing a lot of the traditional retailers like Radio Shack and Sears
IMO Sears is doing more to kill Sears than the Internet is. When you order an item that costs several hundred dollars, and not only does it not get shipped to the store for pickup but no one even follows up on the order, you can't expect to keep very many customers.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
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Radioshack squandered every advantage. There was nothing that would have stopped them creating an online business that really leveraged and complemented their highstreet presence and distribution network. But the management team apparently chose to plunder rather than innovate
Really, how much would it have taken to recognize 5 years ago that they could allow someone to order their choice from a wide range of items before noon and pick it up in-store after 5pm same day, next day for more exotic items that had to come from an out-of-area warehouse. Not only would that be a faster way to order things, but would be a much better way to offer a returns policy and give a chance to sell cables and other accessories.
For the geeky well endowed, could they really not have offered 3d printed parts on a similar delivery schedule (or even in-store) or small scale manufactured parts. Could they not have had a travelling maker demo that moved from store to store every Saturday hawking maker slide or raspberry pis or some such things.
For the less geeky at heart could they not have let people order in-store as they consult with someone who can guide them - Amazon would sure get a lot more business out of my parents if they somehow improved their comfort levels with buying online.
It's not like they would have had to stop selling cell phones if they didn't want to.
Nullius in verba
That wouldn't be Softside, would it? When they first started to publish Basic games for the TRS-80, R/S threatened to sue for IP violations; only R/S, they said, had the right to say "Radio Shack" or "TRS-80" in print unless they paid royalties. So Softside began referring to them as "S-80 bus" games.
R/S got their wish: nobody ever discusses Radio Shack computers in print any more.
I was hoping "Incredible Universe" would make a comeback...
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
No-one cares AC. Your pointless troll will disappear like mist on the side of a mountain. But sootman will still have his bargain T-Shirts and LEDs.
I'm wondering if the variance in reported RS experiences reflects a difference in management between the company-owned outlets and the franchise stores. Maybe the one you went to was a franchise, where the owner is invested and thus takes an active interest in making a go of it, instead of simply following edicts from corporate.
because suburbanites and flyover folks won't shop in them. Mom and pop and competing national chain open on the same block, the entire crowd flocks to national chains, particularly in smaller communities. Hell, they're even proud to have them. Getting a Wal-Mart means they've arrived, it puts them on the map.
The only place where Mom-and-pop shops still survive are in heavily blue urban areas, where they continue to do well. That's no accident.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
They seem to have decided a number of years ago to try to be Best Buy, only in 1/20th of the floor space, with higher prices, and while ensuring that they rebadge any major brand products to bear their own, woefully antiquated and little-known brand badges instead, to ensure that consumers would gravitate to Best Buy instead, where said major brands with which consumers were familiar continued to remain on display.
It started to make zero sense sometime in the late-1980s and it just got worse and worse from there.
I still buy parts, diagnostic equipment, and accessories for many tech items in the house. Just now I buy them on Amazon.com. I just bought a pack of about 30 DPDT switches the other day for $5.00 or so. I don't need 30, I just need one. I'd have just as well paid Radio Shack $2.99 for a switch and had it the same day—only the local store doesn't carry that stuff any longer.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Let me ask you this: On the day Wal-Mart opened in your town, there was still a hardware store, and an independent grocery store, clothing and shoe stores, ...
There is a Walmart 4 miles south of the downtown where I live. It sees plenty of business as does the Lowes right next to it. We don't have an independent grocery store in our downtown but we do have a Kroger there and two independent grocery stores within 3-4 miles of downtown. What do we have downtown? We have a hardware store, several boutique clothing stores, a shoe store, several good restaurants, a bakery, a coffee shop, and a bunch of other generally thriving small businesses. Walmart has hardly made a dent in their businesses because they aren't really competing with Walmart.
What we don't have is a bunch of businesses trying to compete with Walmart head on. If you want cheap stuff from China that's fine and Walmart is the place to go and nobody does it better. If you want an actual high touch shopping experience, you'll go somewhere else. Walmart is only a death knell to small business that try to provide the same services for higher prices. We have a local grocery store that provides a MUCH different experience than Walmart. They have a high quality butcher, they sell far better quality produce, they have baked goods you wouldn't dream of finding in Walmart, they have a greenhouse, and cooking classes, etc. If you want cheap kraft mac-n-cheese, they might have it but you'll get a better price at Walmart. They don't compete on price because ultimately there can only be one winner if you compete on price. They sell stuff you won't and never will get at Walmart and they're doing fine.
Did you still go to those places, and never go to Wal-Mart? Myself, I resisted, but soon those stores were gone. And one by one those employees went to work at Wal-Mart for half the money.
Sounds like those stores were only thriving because they were capitalizing on the fact that there was no price competition pre-Walmart. I have no love for Walmart but they serve a purpose which is to be a place to buy basic merchandise cheaply. Why would I spend more on the exact same shampoo or dog food elsewhere? Honestly I buy plenty of stuff from Amazon which is even better for me because I don't have to go anywhere. It just comes to me. But I still go to my local stores because they provide me things I can't get through Walmart or Amazon.
RadioShack dabbled in Enthusiast PC hardware, but gave up on it. I found them to be fairly priced for getting stuff I needed "now"
Really? I have bought some stuff I needed "now" though RadioShack in the last few years. I pretty much always felt like they were gouging me on price and their selection generally sucked. The ONLY reason I ever had to go to a RadioShack was when I needed something right this minute and there were no other convenient options. I have a Microcenter across town but it's a 45 minute drive to get there. I can order from Amazon if I can wait until tomorrow. But the number of times when RadioShack actually was the best available option has been very few.
A deal with Apple makes total sense...b/c Radio Shack is so many places where Apple stores are not.
It's not about quantity of locations its about quality of locations. Apple chooses the locations for their stores VERY carefully. They aren't in 2000 strip malls for a reason. They would have to seriously compromise a lot of about what makes their product and sales experience different. Honestly I cannot think of any value in RadioShack's rotting carcass to Apple.
Amazon on the other hand... maybe. The biggest risk to Amazon is companies like Macy's or Walmart finally figuring out that stores can serve as warehouses. Amazon is building warehouses all over the place to get closer to customers but Macy's and Target and Walmart already have this. They just lack the back end IT that Amazon has. Amazon is working towards getting storefronts and if the price is right this might be a way to do it. Maybe...