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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.
Moreso the internet... online you can buy just about anything you need for electronics and much cheaper.
love is just extroverted narcissism
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. They should had jumped onto the maker movement and RadioShack could had been a Maker Space headquarters. However they just sold phone and phone supplies which you can get anywhere.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
No, what got me to stop going to Radio Shack was this:
Me: "I'm here to buy a capacitor"
Radio Shack: "We don't carry electronic components anymore. Can I interest you in an overpriced cellphone instead?"
Me:"Uh, no...do you at least have 9-volt batteries?"
Radio Shack: "Sure. That'll be $10.99. I'll need you address, phone number, and the names of all your children before I can ring you up though."
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I stopped shopping at Radio Shack in the late `90s, back when Amazon was only a bookstore.
The thing is, people who are buying loose parts often have to browse and look at the parts, and compare them, and stand there thinking about which one will work in some project.
And as soon as I walk in the door, they want to "help" me, and after I tell them, "No thanks, I'm just browsing," a second employee, who was in the room when the first one tried, walks up and tries to "help" me, and I respond, "NO thanks" in an irritated voice. Of course I'm irritated, you just freakin' heard me say I don't need "help" and then you walked up and lied to my face by asking a question you already heard me answer. It is offensive to be treated that way. And then a third person walks out of the back, triggered by the door chime, who also asks if I need help. And there is nobody else in the store, so they already know that if nobody is "helping" me, the other two people already asked. At this point, I haven't even found the part I was considering yet, but I'm already angry and leaving.
Stores that don't believe in customer service will die, even when their customers grew up liking them and really really want to give them another chance. I popped back in a few times over the years since, and I always had the same awful experience, and I always walked out without buying anything.
Even when I was still shopping there, they were the first store in town to start trying to demand personal information like name and phone numbers. Once I even had to talk to the manager to make an anonymous cash purchase, because the person at the register hadn't even been trained on what to do when somebody says, "No thank you, cash only." They actually thought they weren't allowed to make the sale!
The only other store I had that sort of experience at was that national woodworking chain store. That was only 2 years ago, and when they said there was no manager available I made them call their regional office to find out that yes, in fact they are allowed to make a cash sale to the general public. They don't seem to be aware that they don't have a cornered market, even if they're the only brick-and-mortar selling some of their items.
Stores should realize, if retail workers are doing something other than assisting the customer with what the customer wants assistance with, they'll get replaced. And the means of replacing them is to not shop at your store.
Holy shit - this can't possibly be upvoted enough. This right here is the ACTUAL answer as to why they failed.
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
Yeah, that's pretty much what did them in of me too. I spent a lot of time an money at Radio Shack in the 70's and into the late 80's. But once they started selling cell phones, it was over for me pretty quick. I actually had a very similar conversation sometime in the very early 90's, except I was looking for a resister. The sad part was that they actually carried all of those components still, they just had them stuffed into drawers. But no one seemed to know about anything other than phones. Nor were they interested in anything else either.
In the nineties it was the outgrowth of Fry's Electronics.
Radio Shack had been a division of the Tandy Corporation. Tandy had several major divisions, of which Radio Shack was merely one. Tandy made missteps, opening "The Incredible Universe" with a fair amount of fanfare and expense as a competitor to the ever-growing Fry's Electronics, only to screw it up. To add insult to injury, Fry's took over many of the locations and ran them profitably without even doing a real remodel on them for a decade, not even repainting the delivery trucks other than sticking a Fry's logo on the doors.
Then they opened Tech America, as a new retail store to get rid of the excess fanfare that apparently didn't work for the Incredible Universe stores, but at least the one here was opened in the same strip mall as an existing Radio Shack, and on top of that they didn't do a good job of advertising what services the store offered. It was not even centrally located so geeks on the north or west sides of town had to drive 20-30 miles to get supplies. May as well mailorder them if that's the case, and then suddenly Tech America is competing with cheaper mailorder.
Then they renamed Tandy Corporation to the Radio Shack Corporation and brought the cell phones in, when everyone was selling cell phones, and they renamed the Tech America stores to Radio Shack . com, only to close them a couple of years later.
Radio Shack should have been the convenience-store of electronics. It should have had later hours, opening say noon and closing at 9pm, such that geeks that were working on their hobby projects could have somewhere to go to get those capacitors or relays that they needed when they either ran-short or were in a pinch to complete it. Radio Shack could have arguably charged ten times what the components were worth if they were readily available and purchasable in small quantities, people in a hurry are willing to pay the extra markup to have it now.
Instead they tried to be Best Buy, Circuit City, CompUSA, and the cell phone store all at the same time, when in reality they should have been more like Fry's Electronics without so much of the TVs and DVDs and major appliances. They also should have pared-back on the number of stores and looked over their geography to pick locations that were convenient for residents of the cities they wanted to operate in.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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