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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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