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With Nothing Left To Sell, RadioShack Is Selling Itself To People (theverge.com)
RadioShack, an almost 100-year-old American chain of wireless and electronics stores, had a hell of ride at retail. The cradle of building your own electronics at home, and an early participant in the PC revolution, is finally facing the end after a long, slow death at the hands of consumer disinterest, a dysfunctional marriage with Sprint. From a report: Tons of electronics stores have shuttered over the past decade, but few are as tragic as RadioShack, which filed for bankruptcy in 2015, appeared to be rescued by Sprint in agreement to co-share the stores, then got kicked to the curb and had to file for a second bankruptcy this past March. The new agreement means hundreds of RadioShack shops will officially close down and be replaced by Sprint stores, fizzling out dreams of the Maker movement. So while this is an end to another chapter of our American electronics retail culture, we do have to wonder: how are the folks at RadioShack doing? They have been selling the leftover stocks of electronics for a while, with only mostly store fixtures, ladders, and carpet tiles seemingly left on offer. This is what RadioShack posted earlier this month. The company has since been tweeting about the leftover stuff it has up on sale, though.
Actually, I think surface mount kicked their butt. I spent a lot of money at Radio Shack in my youth.
I recently went to a local RadioShack going out of business "sale" and heard one of the employees yell at the customers "I don't have a job, stop buying stuff at Amazon people!". I can certainly agree that people have been buying too much toilet paper from Amazon to the demise of local business, but in RadioShack's case, its much deeper.
The start of RadioShack's demise predates online shopping by at least a decade. I'm sure many long time readers here will attest to this that RadioShack for many years has lost its way. I found one of my own blog posts from 2002 in which I complained about RadioShack. There was an episode of Seinfeld in the 90s where they made fun of RadioShack for asking for your phone number when you buy batteries. Hiring people who had no idea what they are doing and little interest in working or helping customers. A product selection that was out of date with what was available on the market and prices that were unreasonably high. Even with their 90% discount on component electronics and maker stuff, I still wasn't interested in buying what they had left because it was still no better than online pricing.
Now i'm hopeful that the vacancy left by RatShack (Its pet names go way back) can be filled by people who may wish to cater more to the Maker market, but have not wanted to risk trying to compete with RadioShack still around.
Clearly they didn't get invested enough into selling clouds.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I got an email saying the "First Saturday Sidewalk Sale" in Dallas, Texas, is closing after over 40 years a week from tomorrow.
See http://app.streamsend.com/private/128wws0yyw/HY8/zoeZgm1/browse/29013379 for the announcement.
A brief history can be found at http://www.sidewalksale.com/FAQ.html .
I worked at a local RadioShack for a few hours once. I had gone through their training (which I had to go to a different suburb for), had store orientation, then by the time my first day came up I had a job offer somewhere else. It so happened that first day was the only day they put me on the schedule - presumably with plans to arrange the rest of my schedule at the conclusion of that day - and so I worked through my day and said thanks but no thanks, I have another job offer elsewhere.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Really that is the only question I have left. I guess Sears is staying afloat by the fact that they own most of their real estate and can use it as collateral. RadioShack by comparison has really nothing to offer any more to keep the doors open. Even as stupid as the decisions made by RadioShack top brass have been, they are nothing compared to the rampaging stupidity and arrogance that is Sears CEO Eddie Lampert.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
That kinda reminds me of the children's book The Giving Tree that I sometimes read my daughter at night.
I would happily let Radio Shack close all its stores if it meant that we could get just one Fry's electronics store in my state (MN).
That was fun electronics. Although I did have to go to Radioshack for the books on electronics to actually learn the theory. Must haves were the semiconductor cross reference, component and circuit books, etc.
I want one of those metal tablets that dispenses the multi-layered Radio Shack invoices. Then I can kill time by scribbling down the names, addresses and phone numbers of my family and friends over and over again.
Should reboot as a makerspace that sells pick and place, laser cutting/etching, and SLA printing services. Setup general part consignment with Arrow or someone.
Fry's is pretty awesome in a pinch. I always stop by during my annual CES/Vegas trip.
I worked there in college, 2004. It was hell. The only customers were people who didn't know that Walmart or bestbuy had everything we sold for 1/2 the price. The only exception being the 6ft wall section of electronic components that got one use in my time there by a fellow college student who complained about the local electronics shop being closed after 5 and making it clear he hated RS.
How did they make it out of the 90s without going under?
RadioShack only has itself to blame. In the internet age, stores are no longer a place to buy products, but a place to get a product quickly or a place to talk to actual people
Agreed with some additions. I go to a store for one of a few reasons:
1) Entertainment. Shopping can be fun. Retail stores that do well understand this and work hard to make the shopping more than just an exchange of money for goods
2) Convenience. Sometimes you need something fast or more efficiently than is possible through online shopping. If I need something Right Now then I'm probably going to make the drive to the local store.
3) Selection. Some goods like produce and meats aren't identical from unit to unit and I want to pick the specific one I want. Also some goods are better purchased when you can actually touch and feel them. If all a retailer is selling is undifferentiated boxed goods then they are in danger of being eaten by Amazon.
4) Expertise. While you can get expertise though an online experience, sometimes there is no substitute for talking to a qualified expert in person. When I bought my first SLR camera it was invaluable to talk to the experts at my local camera shop even after I had done a ton of internet research.
5) Service. Good retail stores often have a service component to their business that is hard to replicate online. My local John Deere dealer services my lawn tractor every year in addition to having products for sale. Amazon would have a hard time replicating this business model.
Good retail businesses incorporate many of these features. Stores like Sears and yes, Radio Shack that sell the same boxed crap I can get elsewhere for less than amazing prices are doomed to failure.
That's what happened pure and simple. Someone pointed out about how they moved away from being a hobbyist shop to an overpriced electronics shop and never moved back into the hobbyist market when the hobbyist market picked back up. They should be the place where you can buy Drones, 3D Printers, and Raspberry Pis and.. have classes where they can bring in outsiders to experiment with the products or troubleshoot what they need to do.
Instead they failed and failed hard. I know I am being a bit of a Monday morning quarterback, but I had been preaching this for a long time. I watched other companies such as Frye's and MicroCenter pick up the slack while CompUSA and Circuit City took a dive. I still don't know how Best Buy continues, but it does. (Not geared towards the hobbyist though)
It's tragic as I would really like to see someone fill the void and maybe mom and pop shops will. That's what I can hope for anyway.
Place something witty here
But when I was a wee physicist working on the space shuttle program back in the mid-90's (Jesus, has it been that long?), I had designed a control system to point a 24" mirror at the space shuttle for exhaust luminance measurements. About an hour before one launch I was tweaking pots in the box to zero out gimbal drift (the trailer I was in had a 250' power cord, and my local grounds drifted all over the place) - naturally couldn't find my pot tool so I used an ordinary screwdriver - and it slipped and shorted the power rail to a CCA inside. The display goes dark, the mirror won't move - I've got nothing. RS was AFAIK the only place to get electronic components. Went out, bought a bag of parts - relays, resistors, caps - they had it all. Cobbled a bypass for the roasted CCA and got it all working at T-3 minutes.
Sure, they dug their own grave, but they saved my bacon back then, and for that I will always think fondly of them.
Oh, and my first complete program was Space Invaders on a TRS-80.
When I was young back in the 80's the most frequent reason we went to Radio Shack was to buy solder, wire switches, resistors, etc....And that's because whenever something electronic broke (such as a TV, radio, tape player, RC car, etc...), we didn't just throw I out and buy a new one. We learned to diagnose and repair the problem, fixed it, and continue using the product. We almost never bought any brand new products there. I think slowly people have just become less willing to make the effort to learn to diagnose and fix anything electronic, so that's why they're dead. Godbless America.
http://www.theonion.com/article/even-ceo-cant-figure-out-how-radioshack-still-in-b-2190
For the past 30 years, I've watched RS descend in to the worst quality goods on the market. They bought into the idea that "low price" was key, and they always had the cheapest, shoddy products, getting worse and worse every year, until I finally gave up on them. Nobody would bother with them, when there are national chains (mostly wholesalers) with high-quality products and fair prices. Even ALLIED has had better quality, and a broader range of merchandise.
Radio Shack took their customers for granted, and their entrant into the laptop computer market with their TRS-80, affectionately (and accurately) called the "Trash-80" with typical of their lack of attention to customer interests.
So, low price (and low-quality, necessary to get those low prices) was their sole game, and management was incapable of figuring out they were on the path toward self-destruction.
Good riddance. The place always felt like it was full of "bad product" cooties to me!
Once they removed the TV tube testers, they were dead to me.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Used to pour over them as a kid in the 70s.
Pretty sure this is nonsense. If the "Marker movement" was cared, Radio Shack would still have a revenue stream. They, just like everyone else, order most of their parts online. Particularly hard-to-source electronic components of the type Radio Shack excelled at providing, are even easier to source online.
What is sad about this is the existence of more Sprint stores. Mobile carrier stores are pointless and just take up space. I want them all to shut down, and for these companies to give the money they currently waste on these physical presences back to me with lower rates.
For R/C cars, planes, drones the selection online is far better than any one store could ever provide.
If I need a cable I go to Monoprice or Amazon. It seems any physical entity charges highway robbery for the most mundane of cables. I can buy what I need plus backups/extras for the same price as any brick and mortar store.
For computer stuff we have a Micro Center near us, every time I visit the place is busy. They stock everything needed to build a PC if you want to buy local, or you can walk out with a complete system. Sales people at Micro Center generally know what's going on, or will summon someone who does if it's not their department.
The cell phone stores are pretty ubiquitous and can provide more in depth service, although I've gotten my two last phones from one of the online resellers. My MVNO is happy to point me at the reseller and tells me exactly which one to buy. Phone shows up at my house and I activate it with a few mouse clicks.
A/V equipment is really well covered online. I've bought from NewEgg, Amazon and Crutchfield over the years. Crutchfield by far stands out as the best car stereo buying experience out there. I replaced a head unit and they also put in all the "extras" needed to put the thing in my car, and the included instructions were clearly written and easy to understand. For other stuff like TVs, receivers, blu-ray, consoles the prices are pretty much the same and shipping is quick.
Batteries can be found anywhere from the local BJ's/Costco to online at the usual suspects, for a decent price and in just about whatever quantity you might like.
I don't see what Radio Shack could do that could keep up with the better options available out there, plus their staff was generally poorly trained / unresponsive and the stores didn't stock anything useful. I went in looking for basic stuff on more than one occasion but walked out empty handed because the price was ridiculous or it wasn't in the store, or both. It's no wonder they were circling the drain for so long. There's probably even a net gain in the size of the market they were serving, and more jobs for the market, too.
I thought prostitution was illegal?
Huh? I can buy anything on ebay for far less money than RS and have it delivered to my door. Arduino boards on ebay cost less than resistors at RS. Any sensor is about $1 except the exotic lightning detector at $30.
Just like Sears should have become Amazon. It's easy to say in hindsight, but they were right there and just had to make the jump.
I mean they have serious issues, including some really incompetent sales staff, but the store is full of shit people buy. Appliances, TVs, clothes, tools, etc. So people do shop there, they do make money, just not as much as they should. It's also a kind of store that is relevant today. You can see similarities to Sears in Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Best Buy and so on. Now they aren't all once-to-one the same and clearly some of the other retailers are doing it much better, but the idea of a large store where you buy many kinds of things is one people like and shop at.
Radioshack though, they stopped selling pretty much anything useful. They became more or less a second rate cellphone store. Nobody was interested in that since it turns out your cellphone provider has their own stores (no matter which one it is) not to mention all the other big box stores with cellphones in them. They were just never able to figure out what to become after DIY electronics became less of a thing.
It became useless long before the Internet became a huge thing. Their selection became worse and worse, their prices got stupid, and their customer service was crap.
While Internet businesses certainly have hurt traditional retailers, it isn't like it has been a death knell. Walmart, Target, Home Depot, etc all seem to be able to be consistently profitable. I could get everything I get from Target on Amazon, but Target is convenient, economical, and a good shopping experience so I buy from whichever suits me for a given thing.
Radioshack would have died without Amazon, they have far too many other stores offering competition.
fuck off russian troll
Back in college ('97,'98) Radio Shack was still holding on to it's true roots and was an awesome place to have a part time job. Your pay, while commission based, required that you pass a series of tests, and these tests were no joke. You had to understand circuits, voltage, amperage, why you can't sell anyone a business band radio etc etc. Radio Shack had never been about the money. It was about selling people things they didn't need, it was about helping them solve their problems.
When the new CEO took over he began to focus on short term profit like Long Distance service, Cell Phones, Satellite, and things like that. Then came "You must ask everyone for their name and address" and about their Long Distance Provider, and what cell phone they had. I shit you not, they even called it "Helping your customers".
The district and regional managers were slowly replaced by disgusting individuals who cared nothing about integrity and focused on profit. Our Manager Wayne Edwards was probably one of the most honest people I've ever known. What comes deeply disturbed him and it bothered me to watch him go through it.
I'll always remember the day Thomas Montegue (District of Cary, NC) came to our store and told us how he could easily beat us in sales and bet us $100. I interrupted him and said I'll take that bet where you do your sales thing, and I'll do mine. At the end of the day I told more than $1000 more than him and never sold a phone, never asked a single individual for more than necessary info (some things you had to give your info). This is where the real poison showed. He turned things and went "Well I made more money for Radio Shack. You focused on making money for you". I was a bit surprised by this considering I didn't work there to "make bank", I worked there because I enjoyed helping people solve problems.
Soon after, the test requirements were scrapped and Radio Shack starting hiring anyone they could "to meet growth needs". I'm talking the people who didn't know (or care) about the difference between a digital cable (hdmi) and analog.
During the summer of 2000 I was the top ranked salesman in our district 7 weeks in a row. I worked 5 hours a week, on Sundays but had developed such a relationship with certain customers (NC State professors, electronic hobbiests, etc) that they would leave orders for me to put in for them. Keep in mind this was before online purchasing really took off. Thomas contacts our store and says any online order over X dollars is no longer considered for commission and is a higher level sale. Doesn't make a lot of sense does it? Corporate was taking large order profits for themselves and cutting us out.
Needless to say this didn't sit well with those customers and they stopped doing business with us completely. They used us not because we were the cheapest, but because we knew where to order quality parts from and how to handle problems that arose to meet their needs.
The last straw for me was the increased "trainings" at the district office where Thomas would put in a VHS video from the last 70's early 80's to teach us how to better sell modern technology. I'm not kidding, we're talking the whole leisure suit mustache combo and everything. The guy would say "You'll probably only see that customer once in your career. Sell them everything you think they need and everything they don't! That's how to be a winner". It was embarrassing.
I placed my head on the table and was immediately called out by Thomas. I can't remember what he said exactly but it was something like "So Mr , is this training making you tired? Do you think you know everything there is to sales?" my response definitely ended my career. "Definitely not. But I beat your sales challenge, and everyone else for 7 weeks until you changed the rules." There was a lot of laughter.
I was terminated a week later for failing to ask every customer for their Name and Address supposedly due to a "hired test customer" during the week. It was funny because I only worked on Sundays and hadn
My car battery died one morning so I got a ride up to Sears because it was the closest and on the same side of the highway. I stood around the automotive counter for a while with another customer. This section was roped off from the rest of the store (it had its own entrance) so they didn't want people coming in? Anyhow I told the other customer I was going to Pep Boys and he said "good idea" and I left. This Sears is currently closed.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
In England, I used to browse Radio Shack in office lunch breaks. Just seeing their components would suggest projects (including many I never finished). They couldn't survive on that volume, but now we have 'Maplin' instead, which has done everything that was needed (even though smaller components are 'downstairs). Don't know their financials, but it's a great resource when you're stuck - and includes knowledgeable staff.
I had heard, last year, about efforts to take what little of RadioShack was left, and try to craft it into something resembling its old self (in so far as being focused on the electronics hobbyist, providing reasonably priced components, kits, and tools again). Looks like that isn't happening... bummer, as that would have been so cool to see rise again.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
In a world where those odd parts were anything but just barely profitable (they were mostly loss leaders), such a move might have made sense. Especially if there were around a thousand times more such geeks in the general population than in our world.
Had they done that, they still would have gone broke.
Folks, Radio Shack started moving away from being a purveyor of parts, adding high end audio, back in the 1930's because there wasn't enough money in parts. They started shifting to consumer grade gear back in the 1950's because there wasn't enough money in parts+high end audio gear. There's simply not enough geeks to make retailing parts a viable concern. Never has been, never will be.
Yep. One of my EE professors -- and this was still back in the early 90s! -- used to love making fun of their slogan.
Radio Shack: "You have questions? We have batteries."
If they sold Raspberry Pis and equipment
This is what RadioShack posted earlier this month.
Twitter has a stupid character limit, everything is abbreviated and unreadable, and yet you still can't be bothered to quote them? The link to the "status" is probably longer than the text of it. Why should I have to go to twitter's stupid ass useless website just to see what they said? Why can'y you just quote it?
This is why the web is broken. Fuck twitter.
Once they started putting the 6.5536mhz crystal behind the counter and wanted every piece of information on you to sell you one is when they lost me!
but America losing it's manufacturing base probably hit them just as hard. Nobody's encouraging kids to go into EE anymore because there's no jobs to speak of (out side of the top end design work, which just doesn't employ that many). I'm not gonna buy my kid a bunch of electronics to learn for a career that finished going overseas in the 90s.
Their other problem is convergence. Used to be you'd have a stereo that did Records, Tapes maybe even 8 track and if you were rich CD. You'd have phones in every room of your house, a computer with extra wiring for your second phone line and a camcorder and a CB in your car. All that's just a phone and maybe a cheap receiver with bluetooth for the phone to connect to.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
to support a nationwide store. Those geeks are going to buy online for a fraction of the cost. There occasional geek that needs an extra capacitor isn't going to support a large chain...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
I just the other day went to the RadioShack here in Yuma. I bought lots of cables and adaptors and miscellaneous crap they had left at 90% off. I got USB cables, HDMI cables and adaptors for nearly everything I've ever used, for pennies on the dollar. It made me sad because I've grown up shopping at the Shack for all kinds of electronic components since I was in grade school. Heck I even bought several LED light fixtures from display cases for my garage and man cave are and spent less than $50 for what I would value is several hundred dollars worth of stuff. RIP RadioShack.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
You had to special order it from the one in my town, and rumor had it that they turned your info over to the phone company if you ordered it at the same time you bought their tone dialer.
I just ordered the crystals from Jameco or Digikey. :)
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
Good story. I was poor, 20, a EE student at NC State in 94. Applied at that particular Cary Radio Shack. Even had spent 3 years in retail in HS. They didn't bother to call me back.
Bwahaha, conspiracy nutjob delusions are so funny.
Gee whiz - everyone agrees that Radio shack management was off target.
What it recently missed was selling iPhone DIY repair kits when that was the rage .
Before that, in India and Thailand, they had manuals how to fix your expensive flat screen TV that just failed, Consumer level service manuals.
Right now Apple and others are fighting ' right to repair' laws, third line forcing, and anything to extend durability. THAT is the market.
They also missed technology lessons, and selling software beyond pick it of the shelf level. Sad as I are to see them go, when Amazon gets its voice Siri working, new heat will be applied to Frys and the like. it all adds up to brand names loosing their premiums.
Lots of people have chimed in on this, but I will add something else.
If you can get what Radio Shack sells in their stores for cheaper online (duh) then why were their prices so outrageously expensive?
I am willing to pay more for the convenience, or for things that I need physical access to review (e.g. shoes), but their prices were absolutely ridiculous.
As many people, I used to go there quite a bit in my youth. As I got older I moved a few times, and they weren't always where I lived. About 4 years ago I moved again, and there was one very close to my house. I was looking for a toggle switch, and after looking at a few other stores I tried them. They didn't have the specific one I wanted, but their prices were double what they should have been. I was kind of floored. No, I don't want a $13 toggle, thanks. I know there are high-quality switches out there that cost a bit, but these weren't them. It was sad. The store was sad. There were very few actual components, mostly just electronics, headphones, phones, tablets. It's like Best Buy's weird little cousin.
To me Radio Shack is kind of like ACE hardware. I remember them as being the place to go for certain things, and I could always find something else to buy as well. ACE always had any nuts/bolts/etc. They had everything you needed, and some you didn't. Sure, there are sites like McMaster Carr and Fastenal but being able to get what you need when you need it is a great thing. I also still like the idea of a local store. That's why one of my favorite places these days is Rural King. They still have free popcorn from a machine, free coffee, and quite a good selection of nuts/bolts/hardware.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
but America losing it's manufacturing base probably hit them just as hard.
Several problems with that statement.
1) America hasn't lost its manufacturing base. That is a myth unsupported by facts. American manufacturing is alive and well and produces over $3 TRILLION in goods annually. The manufacturing that has left is labor intensiveNobody's encouraging kids to go into EE anymore because there's no jobs to speak of (out side of the top end design work, which just doesn't employ that many). I'm not gonna buy my kid a bunch of electronics to learn for a career that finished going overseas in the 90s.
False. My day job is to run a manufacturing company that makes wire harnesses. Your prediction of the death of electronics could not be less true. I deal with this stuff on a daily basis. The auto industry is hiring all the electrical people they can get as we electrify cars. A typical car has many miles of wires and more electronics than any other device most of us use on a daily basis.
The sale of small parts declined when electronics moved to robotic assembly and surface mount parts. Modern circuit boards are too densely packed to be easily repaired; for the most part even the companies don't try, they just throw them away. (Expensive boards like computer motherboards do get repaired, but they ship them to China to do it so the work can be done with inexpensive labor.) And it takes specialized tools and quality magnifiers to be able to work on them at all, so the cost of entry is non-trivial. The amount of time that a repair would take means that a small independent shop really can't make a living at fixing boards; they can swap main assemblies for new ones, fix connections between boards, and replace a few large parts like connectors, and that's about it.
The same trends pretty much killed kits. To put together a non-trivial kit using surface mount parts you have to do a lot of work to package it appropriately, because some of the parts have no markings at all, so they cannot be identified without testing once you have removed them from their spool. (Ceramic capacitors are a prime offender.) And after you have gone to all that trouble, your market is limited because most electronic hobbyists aren't interested in building a surface mount kit. It is becoming increasingly difficult to design a kit that uses old fashioned through-hole parts; many components now cost far more in that form, are no longer available, or were never made in through-hole versions at all. Small kit companies still exist to sell to electronic hobbyists and amateur radio operators, but it's because those people like to build things and will buy kits even if they don't save any money.
Fighting against those trends meant that Radio Shack's business of selling components would have declined no matter what they did. But they worsened the problem by their own actions. They hired the wrong people for that business, gave them the wrong training, and offered the wrong pay structure. This is all assuming that the company actually wanted to sell any parts rather than merely keep them around as a vestige of their old days.
The pay structure matters because the salaries of the people on the Radio Shack were poor; the only way to make any money at the job was on sales commissions, and those were only significant for the large ticket items. (In the last few years that has mostly meant phones; farther back it would have also included things like CB radios and stereo components.) Sales people don't want to spend any time helping you find parts because there is nothing in it for them, and it takes them away from possibly serving a customer who might buy something that they will earn some commissions on. Getting a reputation in the store for being knowledgeable about the parts could be counterproductive; the other salespeople would then foist all those customers onto you while they served the more lucrative phone buyers.
If Radio Shack had wanted to have people on the floor who actually had a clue about electronics and electronic parts, they would have had to pay them more. And it probably would have helped to take the further step of eliminating commissions and simply giving people a good salary. Commissions have lots of problems, including the perverse incentives that I mentioned above, and the fact that they make the salespeople enemies of each other rather than allies. But I think the core problem is that they make the self interest of the salesperson be directly opposed to the self interest of the customer. The sales person wants to just sell you as much crap as possible as quickly as possible because that maximizes their commission. Given the lousy pay, they're probably not planning to stay in the job long enough to care about repeat business.
Putting the parts in drawers didn't help. It made the parts business less visible. It made it difficult for hobbyists to browse the parts and perhaps find something they wanted it to buy, making it something that was only useful if you were looking for a specific thing.
In 1983; Tandy Corporation (Radio Shack was the retail outlet) had an 80% market share in desktop business computers and a 70% market share in home hobbyist computers. By 1990; they didn't make a computer.
What happened was one huge decision. In 1984; IBM offered the IBM-PC running a new operating system that was a rebranded Q-DOS called PC-DOS 1.0 sold by a new startup called Microsoft. The big boys at IBM actually effec up royally and releases a computer that overheated due to the huge chip count on the boards and an OS that might, if you were lucky, run for 15 minutes without crashing. But, no one ever got fired for recommending buying IBM. A mediocre OS became the standard overnight despite being a marginally performing system. What did Tandy Computers, Inc. do... canceled the TRS-280 project which would have given us a PC-AT five years early and decided to quite using their own design and try to make IBM clones. After a few years; they sold Tandy computer division to Asus.
Along with the decision to make IBM clones the decision was made to quite having other electronics built to in-house design and handle "name brands" putting themselves in direct competition woth K-mart, Sears, and Wal-Mart. And the hobby market was to be de-emphasized and not stocked in stores but available by special order.
Ignore and reject your original core market, quit manufacturing and become just another retailer, get rid of anything like knowledgeable customer service that would justify the higher cost of the business model...... if you are big enough and have actually profitable subsidiaries; it can take decades to kill your business. The Radio Shack franchise is finito. Another factor is the demise of thin film recording tape. For many decades there were only two manufacturers in the world for the actual recording tape media; BASF in Germany and Tandy in the U.S. Anyway, the Radio Shack I spent so many hours in back in the 1960s and 1970s getting pieces parts to teach myself electronics died in the 1980s. The terminal throes lasted until this decade.
NRRPT/RCT
Well, it's just like email is destroying the U.S. Post Office :-) and because of cellphones, we don't see payphones on the streets anymore. Time marches on...
Who needs one-hour photos, when you can have as-soon-as-you-press-the-button photos?
These things happen, but hey, there are some entire store chains that have disappeared:
http://www.newser.com/story/18...
http://www.newser.com/story/20... http://www.newser.com/story/24...
That's what she said!
Your employer makes money be selling phones...so you didn't sell enough phones. Sounds like you weren't doing your job and just "clerking" some low-value parts. Besides, I am sure you worthless advice wasn't missed long at your store.
Wow. I'm sure you were the Pied Piper of Radio Shack, with an unbroken line of customers following you to your next Radio Shack venue.
Sounds like the typical Radio Shack salesperson with delusions of grandeur. So, assuming you have moved on from the Shack, what lame profession are you currently pursuing? I am guessing either a Sprint salesperson or a self-proclaimed "senior web developer" of a one-person company. Perhaps, given your skills, you are working for a laxative company so you can keep "moving product" out the door.
So, how many of those figures are to the right of the decimal point?