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.

Comments

Re:How did Sears outlast them?

[damn_registrars]

You describe a very different Sears from the one I was in most recently. The last time I went in to a Sears I was one of at least 8 customers in the tools department, and there were a total of ZERO employees there. This was shortly after the store had opened for the morning. Any one of us could have easily walked out the door with merchandise and nobody would have been able to stop us. I went to the adjacent department where I found someone in clothing who was at a register. I asked him to page someone to help us in tools; care to guess his response? He told me he could not, and would not, do that. He actually REFUSED to help us.

Care to guess why he would not help us? Not because he was worried about deserting his department and its zero customers. He did that because that is what corporate told employees to do. A while back Eddie Lampert decided that he needed to add some aspects of Lord of the Flies to his established Atlas Shrugged philosophy. A formal order was passed down that employees are not to help customers who want help in other departments. If you ask an employee in electronics how to get to tools, they should respond by trying to sell you a television. No employee is to ever help a customer purchase anything that is not in their department.

That said, the stores I've seen aren't far from empty. Sears is having serious credit problems right now so there are lots of empty shelves as they can't get merchandise in.