Inside RadioShack's Slow-Motion Collapse (2015)
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I remember the store nearest my house growing up having multiple AISLES of just power adapters and barrel connectors, etc, and it was a tiny store in a strip mall sandwiched between a Baskin Robbins and a Subway.
It was certainly a sad realization.
In both stores it was at least three aisles worth of things like components, perf boards, various breakout kits, enclosures, etc.
- Most of the cabling and audio components are out on the shopfloor, which is handy,
- They do tend to (always?) have a component counter at the back, which fronts onto their warehouse/storeroom space, where you can usually get what you need. I guess that stuff is too easily stolen to have out front.
For example, what if they partnered with Raspberry Pi, and offered a Pi store inside of Radio Shack where you can buy Pi's, accessories, and talk to Pi experts. Copy the Apple store experience for this vertical.
According to this post[1], they've sold 10 million Raspberry Pi's. At an average price of $35 each that represents a 350 million dollar market. While not huge, there is certainly opportunity to capture accessories. See cell phone cases as an example.
[1] - https://www.engadget.com/2016/09/08/raspberry-pi-10-million-...
There is a reason they tried to switch to cellphones.. needed something easy to sell and expensive enough to justify their rent.
The trouble is that Radioshack tried to pivot from being an enthusiast and hobbyist store into a more general retail electronics store. They are small storefronts in strip malls not suited for carrying large stocks of big ticket items like the Best Buys of the world. Because of this limitation they focused on small consumer electronics, mostly phones, and pit themselves against both big box retailers and the Telephone Carrier who run their own shops in the very same strip malls.
There was one person in the store, sitting at a fold-up table with a Sprint table cloth over it. They explained that I wouldn't be able to buy anything except cell phones because the Radio Shack employee had gone on break.
I've said for 10 years now that Radio Shacks problem was its focus on cell phones. Employees were highly incentivised to sell phones, and everything else suffered as a result.
Just as mentioned in another comment...Anyone can sell phones now, and once that became a reality, they began competing with much leaner business models that focused on phone sales with much lower overheads.
http://www.sbnation.com/2014/11/26/7281129/radioshack-eulogy...
One of the funniest/saddest things I've ever read.
The Netflix agent assured me that this could only have happened if my "email got hacked". Hmmm, I'm not sure that Netflix is the high-value target there...
The cashier gave me a disdainful look and didn't even want my money. He just handed the cap back to me and told me to leave with it.
These days I just order parts off of eBay. They arrive in a few days, and they're really cheap. The parts usually work, too.
Yes, 75% of it is junk. But when you get the remaining 25% for 1 cent on the dollar, it's hard to work up a good complaining frenzy.
So that cheap capacitor would have dragged down this employee's performance rating and compensation. It was better for him personally to ignore a capacitor disappearing out of the store than it would have been to ring it up and take your money.
I wish I could find the article; there was a story in it almost identical to yours.
In a way this reminds me of when HN used to track not just your total karma but also your average karma. If you cared about such things, it meant that every time you posted a comment you had to think not only about whether it was a worthwhile comment, but also whether you expected it to move your average karma up or down.
If you had an average karma of 10, then you wouldn't want to post a comment that you figured may only get 5 upvotes - even though those votes meant that five people appreciated your comment.
To me at least, HN seems like a friendlier place now that average karma is gone. And RadioShack would have made more money if they hadn't made their salespeople worry about lowering their average sale.
But, like some of the wacky schemes I've come up with, it must have seemed like a good idea at the time.
Retail shops need to be cognizant of how aligning to certain metrics can be short-sighted and ultimately drive away customers, but that reckoning has yet to arrive.
[0] http://kotaku.com/new-gamestop-program-leads-employees-to-li...
I'm not going to get into any long RS stories but in terms of sales averages, it went roughly like this as far as I can recall: Actual hourly wage was around the state minimum but you could make commissions and "SPIFF" bonuses for selling things like cell phone contracts (since they got a cut of those). The cell phone thing was straightforward - sell a phone contract, get a flat amount added to your paycheck.
But the commission thing was awful and things were set up so that it was incredibly difficult to get commission. You had to sell not only a certain amount, but rather your average for each day of a pay period had to be at a certain level in order to even qualify for commission. If you were unable to hit those goals every day, you got no commission, even if one of those days you sold thousands of dollars worth of merchandise.
So they would make sure to give everyone at least one or two short shifts a week or shifts during crappy hours so that it was nearly impossible to make commission. Combine this with the sales meetings you had to attend out of town every (month? can't remember) it was almost like you were losing money by working there.
Thankfully I found some other crap job that at least paid better and in time, I moved on to better things but man...that place was awful.
i used to go into them as a child, do the hobby boards and that pretty much got me into programming. I stopped going later in life as the electronics isle got smaller and smaller.
Now we have JayCar -- only sell electronics, long isles of caps and components. DIY everything. Seem to be going strong! They are semi used by tradies, but we still have other wholesalers who mainly service that market.
http://www.smh.com.au/business/retail/dick-smith-closing-dow...
[1] https://foragerfunds.com/bristlemouth/dick-smith-is-the-grea...
Pretty much just drug dealers, right?
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/electronics/geek-squad/pcmcat138...
The writing was kind of on the wall, even back then. Metric and spiff driven sales staff. They were making quick money without thinking about long term viability.
They eventually sold off Computer City to CompUSA but I was long gone by then.