A Eulogy for RadioShack | Hacker News Reader

A Eulogy for RadioShack

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412 pointsThevet167 comments

I'd be willing to bet that this is exactly the way it was at most, if not all, corporate RadioShack stores. On the other hand, the franchise stores (which mostly no longer exist) could be great places to shop and to work, because they were owned by actual breathing human beings, not faceless corporate overlords.

My first "real" job after high school was at the local RadioShack, which was owned by one of the most amazing people in my early adult life. I had shopped there for years as a teenager, as it was the only place I could find electronic parts without cracking the Mouser catalog. This was the mid 90s, and there was nearly no e-commerce yet. One day I was in there looking at the HTX-202, RadioShack's entry into 2-meter amateur radio handsets, as I had just been licensed as a Technician Class ham for the first time. Richard said "Hey, Morgan, you still looking for a job?" "Sure, but what happened to Dennis?" I replied. He said "Well, Dennis kinda died." Poor Dennis, his only employee and an elderly gentleman, had suffered an aneurysm and just like that, he was gone. Thus, thanks to the untimely death of a nice old man, I got my first and only RadioShack sales associate position.

Working there was an absolute blast; the pay sucked and the only commission to be had was on Primestar satellite sales, but Richard was like that cool uncle everyone has. I learned a lot about how to run a small business from him, and there was never a day that we didn't have fun. Christmas season could be hectic, but in a good way, with parents who were delighted to see that we carried batteries for all the toys their kids were getting (along with some nifty toys like R/C cars, too).

Even after getting a better full time job a couple of years later, I stayed on part time with Richard for over a year, until he could hire someone to replace me. I still drop in when I'm in my hometown to say hi, and we still keep in touch via email. It really saddens me to know that he'll likely have to drop the RadioShack name one day soon, but I know his store will continue operating for the foreseeable future. His kind of salesmanship stands far above what you get at the corporate stores.

RadioShack corporate did all of the damage there. The unfathomable boneheadedness of this company goes back so far -- at least to the mid-90s.

The franchise stores were doing so well that corporate got the 'brilliant' idea that they would open up corporate stores within spitting distance of every successful franchise. They figured they could steal the customers away and make more money -- and thanks to friendly financing terms for much better locations, they did. The only franchise stores that survived are basically the ones that have always been run by fantastic people and could outmaneuver the company that should have been their partner all along.

Ever since then, my beloved RatShack has been peddling useless crap. Still, there's nowhere else I can go when I need circuit parts in a hurry.

RadioShack is an absolutely parasitic entity and deserved to be dead and gone decades ago.

We have a fantastic Radio Shack in our town too. Granted, they've branched off quite a bit and sell firearms and ammo as well as electronic components, but the owner is incredibly helpful and knows that his business only thrives because he is service minded. I've long swore off Radio Shacks as a whole, but spend money there whenever I need a component or two even if things are cheaper online.

> Granted, they've branched off quite a bit and sell firearms and ammo

A RS that sells electronics and guns. I would patronize that store so _hard_.

It all depends on the kind of drone you want to build.

Just to make this clear, I want to not know what you'd do with it ;-)

Ha. I wasn't thinking of mixing the two. Just ... while I'm at the store picking up a stick of RAM, pick up a new magazine, or a brick of .22 ammunition.

Guns and drones are, however, an interesting subject. Wildly impractical, now, due to safety, payload, and usability issues.

Ummm... where is this store located?

> It really saddens me to know that he'll likely have to drop the RadioShack name one day soon

Could he turn his shop into a for-profit hackerspace that has inventory for projects?

This is an idea I've toyed with for a while, I called it 'prototype electronics' where the 'store' part had inventory that was known to work together so that projects could be designed, built, and sourced out of the store parts. (this was true early in the RS era as well of course)

There are some annoying liability (ie expensive) issues with letting minors operate soldering irons on the premises or while using solder that has lead in it. But mostly people just don't go out. So when you look at the probability of having enough "customers" you find you need a really large population base while maintaining a very small foot print. New York comes to mind or London. Hard to scale it to more spread out places.

It's a shame really. I learned to use a soldering iron when I was about 10 years old. My dad used to buy home electronics from Heathkit and we would put them together. I took an electronics course in middle school and we would use soldering irons there also. Also a shop class where we used drill presses, sabre saws, all kinds of oil-based paints and stains, etc. (the table saw was one of the few tools that were "off limits" to the kids).

We're now so scared of liability that kids don't get a chance to learn how to work with their hands.

+1. I learnt to solder when I was 14 or so, and did hurt myself a couple of times too. But I lived in India, where there's not many liability issues.

I learned to solder at that age as well. I even had a side-job that included soldering :)

I had similar ideas too. I envisioned designing a PCB and then going to my nearest Rat Shack to pick it up like the one hour photo idea back in the day. I grew up in the 80s and have very fond memories going there and just browsing the electronic components. I think the hacker space is a great idea for kidspic but is probably not viable for the same reasons you mentioned.

http://www.metrixcreatespace.com/

It's such a small town that I doubt that would work. That said, he's the only place in town to get things like scanner radios, small electronic parts, certain tools, and a wide selection of batteries. He'll probably just revert back to the original company name before he became a franchisee, and source his small parts from Digi-key or Mouser.

Radio Shack always struck me as a store that could contain a Kickstarter section.

> he'll likely have to drop the RadioShack name one day soon

Why is this sad when his store will outlive Radioshack? I'm sure he or one of his customers can come up with a better name anyways.

Well like I said, he'll just revert back to the original name, "<Hometown> Electronics" (where <Hometown> is the name of my hometown). He answers the phone as "<Hometown> Electronics RadioShack" as it is, so he could just drop the RS branding.

I say it's sad because it's a strategic location for a RadioShack; the one in the nearest town over dropped the franchise long ago and the owner merged his business with a local hardware store. So for about 30 miles all around, it's the only RadioShack. I have a feeling though, his regular clientele will keep him afloat, and he's smart enough to know how to keep new people coming in.

Maybe the day he drops the franchise and reverts to his own brand a bunch of us HN folks could come out and throw a huge party for him.

Depends; how many of you are willing to travel to the back woods of northwest Georgia? :)

I'm in Rome, GA. Not too far away :).

So you probably know the store I'm talking about, then.

While it's glib to say that Radio Shack was lost for the want of a space, the change in their corporate identity from "Radio Shack" to "RadioShack" -- 1995 -- coincides with their slide to irrelevance nicely enough to seem kind of symbolic. We don't really know what the Internet is, but we've noticed that cool companies are using CamelCase.

I suspect it's hard for people who are under 30, maybe even 40, to believe how different RS once was from the sad sack we have today. I don't think they were ever really cool -- that air you now get from their '70s and '80s catalog of old white dudes trying to be hip is an air you got from those catalogs even when they were brand new, trust me -- but they had big selections of really interesting stuff, most of which was exclusive to them, and frequently had salespeople who were genuinely enthusiastic about electronics and computers. And the importance of the TRS-80 in the early computer scene seems to be vastly underestimated today, I suspect in part because of that perpetual lack of cool. You might dimly remember "Trash-80" jokes, but you may not remember that for a few years it was the best-selling computer in the world. And unless you followed the company, you almost certainly don't remember that they had separate "Tandy Computer Center" stores, or that they sold an IBM PCjr "clone" called the Tandy 1000 that fixed all of the PCjr's problems and became so popular that big name games had exclusive Tandy 1000 features, or that they actually shipped a frikkin' Xenix workstation (The TRS-80 Model 16) years before most people had any idea what that was or why they should care.

And, really, that last one sums up Radio Shack in a nutshell, especially with computers: always either a few years ahead of their time, or a few years behind it. As someone who grew up with the TRS-80 Model I and later Model 4 (and who did a lot of strange mad science stuff with it up even into the early '90s), I'll miss RS -- but the RS that I have fond memories of has been gone a long time.

> While it's glib to say that Radio Shack was lost for the want of a space

But it might be accurate to say that Radio Shack was lost for want of space; to wit, Radio Shack's store format was optimized for electronics-as-niche-hobby, and Radio Shack really never adapted to electronics-as-mass-market, and their small format stores suffered with too little focus for the small space (both in terms of mass consumer vs. hobbyist offerings, and lack of focus within the growing part of the store assigned to mass consumer offerings). RS's corporate parent did eventually get the idea that larger stores were needed, but it got into the game late with Incredible Universe, and eventually got out again.

From at least the early-1990s, Radio Shack has had about as much focus as Fry's -- with stores that often have a footprint significantly smaller than a typical Fry's checkout area.

And don't forget the Model 100 [0], one of the first laptops. I still have mine. It worked the last time I turned it on.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100

Quite a few comments about how Radio Shack lost their way and squandered their opportunity, but really their business model was dead. Nothing they could have done would have changed what happened.

It was a store with a very large number of SKUs that they could only sustain through very high profit margins. Sure that works great when it's Sunday and you need that resistor now, but the vast majority of times people would just order online.

Quite a few comments about how Radio Shack lost their way and squandered their opportunity, but really their business model was dead.

True, but I'm not sure those are mutually exclusive. I'd bet that the primary reason RadioShack never became a major online parts and electronics retailer is because of fear that it'd start cannibalizing their retail stores. Which it would have -- but either you cannibalize your own business or someone else does it for you. And I could certainly imagine an alternate history where they kept their own "captive brands" like Realistic and Optimus and competed reasonably well with the likes of Jabra, Jambox, Vizio and friends; I'm sure they had what they felt were sound business reasons for dumping that strategy, but it removed virtually all possibilities that buyers would go to RS for something only they sold, and I can't help but think that had significant value. (I suspect it's only the Sears captive brands that have let it hang on as long as it has, given how woefully it's been managed its last decade.)

> (I suspect it's only the Sears captive brands that have let it hang on as long as it has, given how woefully it's been managed its last decade.)

The Sears you are thinking about before the last decade was already dieing -- the current "Sears" is the result of KMart buying Sears in 2004 (during a brief profitably period shortly after KMart's own bankruptcy, and the combined entity -- which was called Sears Holdings Corporation -- went south pretty quickly.)

I don't think Sears captive brands are keeping it alive for the last decade, I think the temporary reset it got at the acquisition by KMart has been keeping it alive.

It's the holding company that bought KMart and then bought Sears which I'm thinking of as the mismanager (so to speak), actually. Sears had its share of issues pre-merger but they weren't in as bad shape before KMart bought them as they ended up afterward. It's my admittedly anecdotal impression that when someone ends up in a Sears these days it's probably to buy a Sears-specific brand. That could certainly be wrong. (A cynic might say that when someone ends up in a Sears these days it's probably because they took a wrong turn.)

RS was out of the "grab a part on the weekend for a project" business a decade or so before "order online" was an option.

I still use them all the time for just that. You no longer get a choice of 10 different bipolars and 3 different VMOS FETs, but the parts drawer is still pretty useful when all you need is a relay or an Arduino board.

Same here, though it depends on the Radio Shack.

There are a few of them near me and one is still a pretty decent "need it right now" electronic components place (with very limited selection) but the other two just sell cellphones and HDMI cables and basically nothing else.

Yeah...this is my experience. I hear people say their local RS has components, but all the ones near me are exclusively cell phones, crappy knock-off RC toys and batteries.

Fortunately, my local Frys has a very good components selection.

They transitioned through many variations of the "lots of inventory of small things" markets: Batteries, media, cables, connectors, converters, etc.

Ebay and Amazon, both launched in 1995, spelled doom for a store that relied on selling you the overpriced battery, CD-R, or $90 HDMI cable.

>$90 HDMI cable

Ah, I don't miss being required to hock those at customers. We used to have to watch training videos (in Macromedia Flash!) about how Monster's special braiding technology transferred the bits with more fidelity.

But they really weren't the worst offender. "Overpriced" doesn't begin to describe the markup on their batteries. When I worked there -- and i'm sure it's even more now -- it was several hundred percent. It was absurd to the point that I went to my boss for clarification thinking that maybe the POS drops decimal places or something.

We used to have to watch training videos (in Macromedia Flash!) about how Monster's special braiding technology transferred the bits with more fidelity.

The really sad thing is, I don't think they were consciously lying. Monster's BS wouldn't work anywhere near as well as it does if they didn't believe it themselves.

Obligatory link to The Onion article "Even CEO Can't Figure Out How RadioShack Still In Business":

http://www.theonion.com/articles/even-ceo-cant-figure-out-ho...

That's from 2007, making the continued existence today even more perplexing.

I worked at Radio Shack.

I was in high school and lived with my folks. I had almost no expenses. It didn't occur to me until much later what a bummer it all was.

- You get paid commission, something like 1% per sale. Commission was pointless because almost everyone already knew what they needed (AA batteries or a headphone adapter...).

- If your commission didn't add up to minimum wage, you got minimum wage. Since it was nearly impossible to sell $800/hr at Radio Shack, everyone made minimum wage.

- There was a computer screen in the back room that showed a leaderboard of on-duty employees, and how much each sold for the day in real-time. So even though everyone was making minimum wage, the employees were pitted against each other. This made every employee your enemy.

- If somehow you made a commission for the day, when the item was ever returned, they dock the commission from your next paycheck. So you ended up making less than minimum wage.

This is funny to me because, as a young customer, I distinctly remember thinking, "God, I hate coming to this *$#%@ store. The sales people seem like they're not plugged in. I'm trying to buy an <xyz> and they keep trying to get me to buy an <abc> which has nothing to do with what I'm looking for. What are they smoking? They're not even listening to me!"

I had no notion of selling on commission, but I did understand selling someone a bill of goods rather than what they wanted or needed. And that's about when I stopped shopping there.

I grew up loving my visits to Radio Shack for hobby electronics when I was a kid. It seemed like a place that would be a straight up dream job. Eventually, I worked at a Radio Shack up in Canada to pay for University and I felt the pain of this stupid competition with your coworkers to make $1 more in pay day to day only to have someone return some high commission item days later and put you on the shit list again. If the commission went into negative territory where I live, they still had to pay minimum wage. Commissions were just a bonus and usually only available during Christmas when the malls are busy. I usually went for the "spiffs," which were some kind of payout based on selling special/discontinued goods and often paid better than having to stretch to a 2000-3000 revenue day. Ahh retail. Don't miss it.

All true. I graduated with a EE degree during the dotcom bust, so I worked at RS for a few months.

We were told stories of a sales associate that managed to make about $80k a year. He managed this by getting customers a RS credit card and loading up the customers' shopping cart full of stuff. He did this by telling the customers that their monthly/weekly credit card payments would be $X, which might seem like a reasonable amount to the unwise. The funny thing is, that guy's store wasn't even profitable (well, from what I heard).

Anyways, by the time I worked there, RS had transitioned to being a cell phone retailer more than anything else. I think I've been in a store maybe twice in the last 11 years.

I remember flipping through the Radio Shack catalogue as a kid in the late 70s, early 80s, and making my virtual xmas shopping list (I almost never got the things I actually wanted). radio-controlled cars, walkie-talkies, metal detectors, tape recorders, electronics kits.

I also remember being able to walk into a Radio Shack in my local mall and stroll over to the electronics section and pick out just the right resistor that I needed to complete my circuit project at home. I think I was 12 at the time.

Last weekend, I needed a 10 Ohm resistor and breadboard for a small project - I'd ordered everything else I needed online, and thought I still had spares of those two parts that I couse use. I was somewhat surprised to realize that RadioShack still carried both, and that the prices weren't that bad.

Two Christmases in a row, I got a radio-controlled car from Radio Shack. Two years in a row, that car was dead by New Year's. I never asked for one again.

When I was about 8 or so, I had a friend who was all excited about the remote controlled car he found in the RadioShack catalog that advertised "scale speeds of 60 mph!!!". It was only about $40. What a deal!

He cashed in all his parental good will and actually got them to order it for him. Then it came and the 1:20 scale car basically went about 60/20 mph and we did the math... I felt bad for him, but hey... they didn't exactly lie!

Were you recharging them?

I suspect he was. I used to take Radio Shack R/C cars and re-purpose them into robots. The best ones used treads as that would allow for differential steering which was much easier on the inverse kinematics than the front wheel steering. And Radio Shack always had a 'closeout/clearance' junk table that said R/C cars would end up on.

That experience lead me to understand that a common failure mode was that the radio receiver circuit had some tuning caps on it that would get jostled about, causing the car to cease responding. Not sure why they went with trim caps other than it meant everything else could be wider tolerances if they just tuned it once fully assembled. It did lead to a lot of fallout though.

When I was very young, the Sears Toy Catalog was my Book of Wonders. Then, in my teens, it was the Radio Shack catalog. Now, I guess, it's the Newegg deals page. Things change. I rarely go into a Radio Shack these days, but as others have noted, when you need a part right now, it's often the only choice. I worked on a project a few years ago that had me in the local Shack several times as I discovered I didn't have a part I needed. I'll be sad when they're gone.

Radio Shack had a lot in common with Sears, now also on death's doorstep. Sometimes the contract manufacturers making RS's house brand speakers or Sears "Craftsman" power tools or "Kenmore" appliances would turn out a top-performing product for a great price. As the actual manufacturer might change from year-to-year, one could never rely on the brand to deliver a good value. One had to read magazine or other reviews to discover where the diamonds were hidden.

I actually remember the point that RS became irrelevant to me. After spending lots of free-time hanging out there in the 80s at the local malls, and getting much of my early computing stuff from them, I ended up with a 386sx bought from another local computer store. It was my real first entry into IBM compatibles and I remember how easy it was to mix and match various parts and cards and extend your machine into something much better than what you bought without too much fuss or expense.

And I remember lots of those old early games had special settings for Tandy computers, special video modes, 3-channel sound, that sort of thing (I don't remember the specifics), I wondered what all the fuss was about since you couldn't buy a Tandy video card or audio card and they weren't really "industry standards" in the way a VGA graphics card or a Sound Blaster was.

I went back and visited my local RS to see one of their Tandy machines and came away singularly unimpressed. I realized then that there was really nothing Radio Shack could offer me that I couldn't get easier and cheaper from dozens of other, larger, stores with better selection.

Years later I stopped by to pick up a cuecat and I've never visited a RS outside of that.

I never understood why they didn't start aggregating their small stores into bigger stores. Heck, even Office Depot offered me more selection than my local Radio Shacks. With the coming and going of Circuit City, the entrance of Frys, Best Buy, CompUSA, etc. I never understood why they stuck by the old '70s electronic store tucked away in the corner of a strip mall next to the Laundrymat model.

I learned to program in the early 1980s by playing with a TRS-80 floor model for an hour or two at a time while my mom shopped elsewhere in the mall. My first program animated a sine wave in BASIC by printing a single character one line at a time, and letting the lines scroll up the screen. I would've loved to own one of those computers, but my dad refused to buy one because he said it would be too tempting for me. He didn't even want me to have a hand calculator, and gave me his old slide rules instead (which were fun - not complaining!). I didn't have unfettered access to computers until I went to college a few years later.

I never made a big purchase at RS, but I always appreciated that I could pop in for electronic sundries as needed over the years. My opinion of them started to go south about a decade ago when they began insisting that they needed to know my zipcode every time I bought something. That was very fishy and heralded their sad decline, I think.

RS has been obsolete for years and I really don't know how they've managed to stay in business this long, but I'll miss the name when it's gone.

> My opinion of them started to go south about a decade ago when they began insisting that they needed to know my zipcode every time I bought something.

When I worked for RS just out of high school (1990) that was already corporate policy.

Every time I'm asked for a postal code (in Canada) I always use V4G1N4. They never notice.

I worked there in the mid-90s and it was a phone number.

C: "Why do you need to know my phone number?"

M: "I don't, ma'am, but the computer needs it."

C: "Oh, OK... 313..."

M: "It also wants your address."

C: "What? Why?"

M: {skip}{skip}{skip} "That'll be $5.68 ma'am."

Yep, I used to hang out at Radio Shack every day after school, playing around programming on the TRS-80, along with a few other kids who I still know. They had a box of cassette tapes we could keep there for our programs.

If my memory serves, two decades ago they were doing the zip code thing.

When did they just drop to the zip code? My memories were that they wanted full name and address for each purchase.

It's awful to read that and compare it with what Radio Shack was for us geeklings in the 1980s. For those of us living far from big cities, Radio Shack was the source of electric parts, IC chips, LEDs, not to mention hands-on access to actual computers.

Exactly. It makes me sad that the only remaining source of electronic parts in many areas is likely to close down.

Even with other options nearby, Radio Shack is still the closest place to me that sells such parts -- and the only one that's open past 5pm, or on Sundays.

I wonder if there's a way for them to double-down on the geek side of their inventory. They're at least picking up a lot of "maker" inventory: Arduino and related kits, etc.

They just need to raise demand. They could, for instance, provide and promote free curriculum plans for schools or clubs that just happened to need the kinds of components you can't buy anywhere locally but Radio Shack.

Exactly! With the current maker movement you'd think they would be primed to reinvent themselves.

After reading that article, however, I'm inclined to think that their problems are not so much from a market that changed out from under them, but rather are internal and self-inflicted. If so, then they completely deserve their current situation.

Yeah, that's their problem.

They've actually tried somewhat to stock parts that maker movement-types might want: I was in an RS recently, and I was shocked at how much Arduino stuff they had on the shelves, for instance. When you look at their website, though, it's dominated by Beats headphones and iPhone 6s - they've somehow managed to survive for at least 20 years or so without really picking the market they are trying to serve.

I worked at CompUSA in the mid 90s... They basically suffered from the same problems, but flamed out more quickly because of their large big box format.

The hobbyist stuff at CompUSA (video cards, disk drives, tools, etc) were just a way to get you in to potentially buy a PC.

What's the issue? These stores survived by selling big ticket items like computers and cellular phones at high margin, and upselling people into accessories, service plans, etc. A TRS-80 sold for the equivalent of $1500 2014 dollars, sold at a 25% margin and generated sales of all sorts of other crap. A bag cell phone in 1990 was $1200, and carriers paid substantial commissions for the contract life.

By 2004 when this dude worked there, the PC market tanked for retailers as PC prices imploded and margins shrunk. So they were stuck with selling toys and other stuff. The Nextel craze and smartphone revolution propped them up a bit, but the market for phones is about as saturated as you can get -- my local supermarket sells crappy droids for $40.

I lived in a country town in South Australia in the early 80s, and without the local Tandy (Oz brand of RS) I wouldn't have got into electronics or software, both of which now are my main source of income and also a source of a hell of a lot of fun. Fortunately these days the opportunity for kids to discover new stuff is provided by Internet access, but it's still a sad coda to the joy RS provided in my youth.

I didn't realise that these were the same place! My 50-in-1 Electronic Project Kit manual often referenced "Radio Shack" and visiting a Radio Shack was my number one reason for wanting to go to the US.

Some of the locations have started to carry a bigger electronics component selection again (instead of a single pull-out file of resistors and capcitors), along with 3D printing supplies, Arduinos and related parts (retail packed from SparkFun), and so forth.

Unfortunately, they started doing so 4-5 years too late. I was shocked in 2007-2008 when I needed a couple of resistors to finish a project, the local Nerd Palace (Electronic Parts Outlet, in Houston) was closed on a Sunday, and the local Radio Shack actually had that pull-out file of components with what I needed.

My Dad worked there in the 80s between contracts for a couple months. "Well this contract ends this month, and I've got an awesome database migration contract starting in 6 months, so I've gotta find something to do meanwhile (decades before FOSS type stuff), and I've spent tons of money at RS since it was allied radio and I was a kid ..." This was before they turned into Cell Phone Shack. About half the time they got well over minimum wage back then, even on low sales stores. Sounds like they earn even less now than in the 80s, not adjusted for inflation! One thing that didn't change was the Shack expanding to own your life, so it starts as part time and somehow 3 months later you're an asst mgr (why?) and "working" 90 hours and then a couple months later you're all WTF am I doing here at 100 hrs a week, my contract job starts next week, bye!

The article had a lot of weird stuff about not understanding why people wouldn't leave a crappy job. Well, perhaps 90% of the time the only crappy part was the paycheck, you just hung out and screwed around and occasionally sold stuff to people. So I'd take the city bus to his store after school and we'd play video/computer games for HOURS during the slow times. We had kind of a game on betting when the last customer would come in, maybe 6pm or so most days, then we had the store to ourselves till 10 or so, literally a kid in a toy store. It honestly was a lot of fun almost all the time, just not much pay. You could make a ton of money at lunch and after work rush, and saturdays, like $40/hr (which in the 80s was a lot), but you had to hang out all night long at minimum wage if you wanted the plum hours. Sales were extremely uneven over time. I still don't understand why they ever opened before noon or were open after 6pm or so.

I can prove he worked there... in the mid 80s each shipment contained a hopeless VCR tape of sales blather not for public consumption. Sell Sell Sell!

That's certainly an interesting read... and one I can't really argue with the anecdata of from my own experiences. So I'll add one:

After it was too late by that author's reckoning, the parent of Radio Shack tried another venture, a "big box" store called The Incredible Universe. When that failed and they wrote it off, it wiped out the entire profit of Radio Shack thousands of stores for that financial year.

I still think of it when I'm trying to understand the machinations of large companies.

And I, too hope that the folks I worked with at RS in the 20C found better jobs, especially the poor store managers.

The Fry's in Dallas is in the space of a former Incredible Universe. The Fry's is decorated like a cattle ranch, but Incredible Universe was like a rock concert. The first time I went in there, I immediately thought they were trying too hard to be cool. It was completely over the top, so I'm not surprised they wiped out all of their profits. It's too bad they couldn't find a happy medium.

Yep the San Diego Fry's also moved into an Incredible Universe after they closed down (probably 15 years ago). Fry's never gave it a theme though and never even took the Incredible Universe logo off the delivery trucks

Okay, based on the other replies here I sense a common theme. The Fry's in Wilsonville Oregon is in a former Incredible Universe location. No discernible theme to the decor, it's mostly a "cheap warehouse" vibe.

It's big, but some of the California Fry's stores I've been to were much bigger, and much better stocked.

But Fry's knows how to keep costs low. I'm pretty sure that for at least a decade after the takeover there were a number of trucks with Incredible Universe markings parked outside. No point in repainting!

The Sacramento Fry's also used to be an Incredible Universe. It's the only Fry's I've been to that doesn't seem to be decorated in any theme.

Just to add on to the dogpile, even the Fry's in Indianapolis is in a building originally built for an Incredible Universe.

Incredible Universe was started by the CEO of Tandy, rather than RadioShack.

I think Radio Shack could be reborn if it did a few things. Get rid of the cheap toys. Go back to just electronic parts, and today's technology--like having the Ardino and Rasberry always in stock--along with all the less know electronic kits. Try to keep the prices down. Keep all radios and cell phone stuff, but get rid of the advertisements(I don't like to walk into loud stores). I would also devote a small section of each store to used/recycled/surplus stuff. The workers shouldn't be required to wear ties.

>I think Radio Shack could be reborn if it did a few things.

Top of the list should be 'Replace all middle and senior executives and managers.'

It's fascinating to watch how organisations slide into extreme failure and dysfunction. And the loss is total - not is only is RS a terrible place to shop, it's a terrible place to work.

Achieving an outcome with absolutely no upside takes real talent.

But this kind of simmering hostility to everyone below a certain managerial seems endemic in corporations that grow beyond a certain size. It's not guaranteed to happen, but it seems to happen more often than it should.

It's a fascinating phenomenon. It's surprising it hasn't been researched more fully.

I wonder how big the market is for Arduino/Raspberry Pi kits at a brick and mortar store when it's so easy (not to mention inexpensive) to buy them online at hobbyist sites like Adafruit.

Microcenter has a lot of this stuff now a days.

Let me demonstrate the problem to you, I have two tabs open on my browser

Radioshack.com 10 foot HDMI cable $29.99 "marked down" to $15.99 plus sales tax

amazon.com 3 meter HDMI cable $7.49 plus... plus nothing, free prime shipping

So I can order from amazon right now and have it in two days, or wait days/hours until I have time to visit a legacy brick and mortar and pay twice as much.

So without even looking at the radioshack price, amazon will ship me a rasp pi B bare board for $37.69 prime. I'm guessing $75 at the shack. I go to radioshack.com $119.20 Reg Price $129.99 Pi starter kit. Well, thats got a case, a protoboard, some parts, a flash card, figure maybe $20 worth of stuff.

I'm just not seeing it.

I assure you that in the 80s comparing Radio Shack to a place like Jameco mail order the prices were vaguely competitive by the time you added shipping and handling and there were minimum orders. RS wasn't a bad deal decades ago, believe it or not! I'm not sure how/why they lost that. From personal experience/gossip and OPs article its not labor costs seeing as paychecks apparently haven't changed much nominally since the 80s. Maybe building rents have exploded? Bad corporate financial deals?

> Maybe building rents have exploded?

I think this is plausible as a contributing (but by no means primary) factor.

I owned a few stores in malls in the 2k's and before the Great Recession hit, the publicly traded mall management companies didn't realize how overbuilt and over-priced their spaces were and charged accordingly. Absolutely insane per-square foot rents + gross profit % of rent. It was absolutely impossible to make a profit based on their 10 year lease rates that didn't account for changing consumer behaviors.

I suspect that most Radio Shack locations saw a drop in foot traffic and combined with a mismatch in demographics with their offerings caused a shift to high-pressure sales tactics and less technical products. So sad. I loved the TRS-80.

These factors as well as others, probably pushed RS corporate to local optima that ensured their final demise.

"combined with a mismatch in demographics"

As a concrete example, the local indoor upscale mall used to sell absolutely everything in the early 80s, like a giant department store. So you can take a teenage son to the mall in the 80s and drop him at Radio Shack to look at computers, video games, scanners, ham radio, stereos, speakers, car audio... but the mall has since converted into 95% womens designer fashion and 5% food court, so the Radio Shack has to switch to selling cell phones to women if they don't want to close. As one of the few non-womens fashion stores left in the mall, in the long run, closing is inevitable, and as a stand alone store they can't compete with the giant stand alone Best Buy store, so they're kind of doomed.

I had a model 3 and several coco models including a complete OS-9 system. I never owned anything as nicely designed or as technologically advanced as OS-9 until linux in the early 90s. There's a rather optimistic assumption that technology only moves forwards, but the msdos era wasn't that long ago and provides a counterexample.

Funny you say that, I had a friend who owned a 8-10 mall stores (panera-like cafés), most with one developer who was considered the "prime" mall company in the region.

He had two stores that due to mall expansion and re configurations just died. He operated both at a serious loss for several years -- at one point the mall was fining him for not making money! It killed his cash flow, but He couldn't pull out without losing his good leases. Ultimately, he was saved when a big box store bought out his lease.

" I would also devote a small section of each store to used/recycled/surplus stuff. "

You are talking about something that sounds in a way like "Weird Stuff Warehouse" loved that store.

http://www.weirdstuff.com/cgi-bin/category.cgi?category=sunn...

http://www.weirdstuff.com/cgi-bin/category.cgi?category=weir...

Radio Shack has thousands of stores and they are located in shopping centers and malls. They have to get a certain amount per square foot to pay the rent. And mall shoppers (as only one example) aren't really fitting in to this particular market.

I was in my local RadioShack (or is it "The Shack" now?) looking for a Hall effect sensor. They didn't have one, but they did have Arduino and Raspberry Pi kits along with some Arduino shields.

Sadly though, the electronic parts + kits section of RadioShack reminds me of the PC games section of most game stores now. It's so underwhelmingly small that, if you can manage to even find it, chances are it won't have what you came for anyway.

> RadioShack is a company of massive real estate, and is peddling a business model that is completely unviable in 2014.

We have good evidence to suggest that the RS business model is indeed viable in 2014: it's Maplin https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8328621 (followup https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8329953 ).

Maplin has been doing ecommerce for over twenty years - anyone else remember CASHTel?

Yep. My Maplin customer number is only 4 digits - which always throws the staff if they use it/

Mind you, Maplin has turned into a UK Tandy and is really no longer a sane source for electronic components. Wouldn't be surprised if they eventually went down the pan or shrunk their stores base.

Remember the orange/green/white collectable discount vouchers you'd receive with your orders.

Yes, I thought they were turning into a strange PC-World / odd electrical bits shop too.

So last month I was in US for the first time and I was dying to walk into a RadioShack, the temple of cool things as I have been hearing about on obscure and popular electronics hobby forums since I was 16. After checking out 6 stores in 4 cities, I was really disappointed. No cool stuff. All I could find was phone cases, cheap earphones and a few IC's(mildly interesting). To be honest, I didn't know what I was expecting but certainly not what I saw.

That's what RadioShack was like up until the 90s - lots of cool stuff there, and an easy place to get electronic parts for hobbiests. There were Laser Discs on display in the 80s, TRS-80 CoCos (color computers), followed by Tandy PCs. I remember having free access to play with a TRS-80 hooked up to a thermal printer and dot matrix printer so you could figure out what you preferred - big and noisy or small and silent.

I also remember my friend in high school picking up a special ordered US Robotics 14.4k HST modem with his Tandy PC in 1989 from Radio Shack - I was still on 1200 baud on my c64 and I lost a $5 bet that such a fast modem even existed. I was utterly blown away by the speed.

At some point management decided it needed to be another CarPhoneWarehouse or RandomTechJunkShack

I had similar experience, but I only visited a single store in downtown San Francisco (near Westfield mall). I thought my sample size was just too small, surely the whole chain couldn't be so lame. It's sad to hear that place wasn't an exception.

I wish RadioShack would transition to selling hackable electronics (Raspberry Pi, Arduino, stuff on SparkFun, Maker Bots, etc). That's how they started and now as they're nearing bankruptcy, that market is finally back and getting bigger. Further, most of these parts are made by small-time businesses with suboptimal distribution and RadioShack could be enormously helpful. And I see blogs all the time about how if you have the inside connections to factory owners in China you can get all sorts of cool stuff at very low prices--RadioShack could resell all this.

Edit: but I think RadioShack's future is in the hands of Wall Street types who only see it as an interesting financial instrument where they can cheat some fools out of money before totally liquidating.

Radioshack, want to save you business? Turn every single one of your stores into a hackerspace.

You don't even need much. Get a laser cutter, a 3D printer, a drill press, free WiFi, some tables, and a stack of arduinos and you'll be doing awesome.

Then build an instructables-esque community website for people to show off their projects.

I'll even consult with you guys on this if you make a big enough donation to the hackerspace I help run in Phoenix.

Too niche, not enough profits. My Radioshack plan...

1. Sell off all the inventory.

2. Rebrand, lose the name Radioshack because it's the definition of cheaply made, overpriced garbage. It's embarrassing to even be seen in that store.

3. Go with a minimalistic store layout, like the Apple store (http://cdn.iphonehacks.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/AppleR...), because existing stores look like a warehouse or junkyard. Carry higher end phones, tablets, ebook readers, laptops, headphones and accessories.

4. Sell some cables and things cheap to get people in the door. Instead of selling an HDMI cable for $100, sell it for $5, so people walk in the door, and don't feel like they're being screwed over. Then, when they're inside, they can play around with the expensive hardware, and potentially walk away with a tablet.

I tried to tell this to the RS closest to my home, they won't. I even offered to give them a 3d printer for two months to try, they won't. The manager there told me that the electronics stuff is basically overhead, they're there to sell phones 11 months a year and RC cars in December. The funny part is, the guy is a hardcore libertarian.

I suspect he is telling you the truth, that most of their net revenue comes from phones and toys. It's risky to change to something that sounds like a current loss leader as the primary business, even if in reality there is a significantly different emphasis.

Sadly, the opportunity costs of running a 2nd rate phone store must suck. Sounds like it would be more profitable to use the space to make and sell hamburgers or pizza.

Hmmm. Maybe they could have a "maker" workshop that also sells pizza and beer???

The Radio Shack where I grew up gave out free batteries once a month. I did a science fair project that compared how good Radio Shack batteries were to Duracell, etc, and they were superior by far. It's sad that they are basically dead, but it's the Circle of Life, I suppose, and a good reminder to never rest on your laurels or take it for granted.

Yup, when I was a kid my local RS had the 'battery of the month' club. I remember the card they'd punch and everything. The town was small so the guy knew all of us so we couldn't cheat (although none of us would have even considered it).

I remember being excited to get my free 9v every month. Simpler times.

I was a member of the Battery of the Month Club, too. The local Radio Shack was next to a record store named Licorice Pizza, and they usually had a jar of free licorice next to the register. I'd swing by, get some red licorice, then go next door and pick up a free battery.

I worked at the Shack in 2000, and the batteries really were superior. Not sure if they still are, but even the NiMH batteries were superior to a lot of the other brands out at the time. I don't know how they'd compare to Eneloops, now, though.

While Radio Shack deserves the scorn, it had two big problems at a crucial time.

1) Charles Tandy died in late 1978. This was right as the computer revolution was taking off and his loss of vision was bad news.

2) IIRC, one of the corporate officers embezzled an enormous amount of cash in the 1980's right as the IBM PC clone business was taking off. This stalled the company at a point when it needed to be pivoting. Unfortunately, I have only my memory to rely on as I can't seem to pull this out of any of the web search engines.

Radio Shack at this point is a sad caricature of itself. I remember being able to buy all sorts of ICs, analog parts, interesting radios and kits. Now it peddles cell phones and overly prices things -- I recall needing a battery for my cordless phone recently, they wanted $23 for a battery for a $50 phone? Uh, no.

Two other bay area places that have changed a lot are Frys and the now closed Quement Electronics. Fry's still has a few components, but nothing like the 80s and 90s.

RIP.

> Now it peddles cell phones and overly prices things -- I recall needing a battery for my cordless phone recently, they wanted $23 for a battery for a $50 phone?

Radio Shack always did that -- especially on batteries. High margins on things like batteries is what provided the cash flow that paid for the floor space devoted to more unique things that sold less but brought in customers who bought the batteries.

The problem Radio Shack has now is that with the internet and big-box electronics stores, RS's dinky stores aren't particularly great places for hobbyists (and wouldn't be even if they devoted more of their floor space to them), and they don't have a competitive selection of mass market goods either, so the basic format doesn't work.

"Two other bay area places that have changed a lot are Frys"

One of my fondest memories when I was out in SV in the early 90's was Frys and Weird Stuff Warehouse.

I think I first heard of WSW and Fry's in a book written by Guy Kawasaki [1] who was a big deal in the late 80's.

Recently I had the opportunity to visit Fry's in 2006 when I was in town for an conference. Then later in Las Vegas last year. Fry's of 2006 was no match for what I remembered in the early 90's. But nowhere near as bad as the Las Vegas store which to me was like a large Best Buy.

Another great store that changed was Micro Center. They had all sorts of little parts, tools, gadgets and a great book section. When I recently visited that it had also changed greatly and there was a slop of merchandise as well as empty shelves and little to call a book section (which was a total mess). That was the store in Pennsylvania. They still had the logos of companies in the store as part of the lighted signage such as "Okidata" , "Creative Labs", and so on. They never even took that info down even though from memory most of the companies from their golden era didn't even really exist anymore at least selling to that market (Oki exists but not selling the same type products that would be sold at a retail store like Micro Center). (I had an Okidata 2410 in the 80's loved the sound of that printing things high speed..)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Kawasaki

Interesting. The Micro Center is Rockville, Maryland isn't bad. I don't do too much electronics hacking, but I've gotten into the Arduino and Raspberry Pi maker stuff and they have a good selection that is sometimes cheaper than mail order. The Pi B+ is currently on sale for $30, for example. And they have less-than-mail-order prices on some Intel CPUs, like the i7-4790K I just got for $250. I suppose Micro Center stores vary depending on management and customer base. (This sounds a bit promotional, so I'll add that I have no financial interest in Micro Center, I just shop there a fair amount.)

Ah Fry's. A wonderland of gadgets, electronics, and all kinds of fun toys, with an 80% defect rate.

There was a period a few years back wherein everything I bought there had some defect. Literally 5-6 things in a row: cordless phone, monitor that could not be adjusted, LCD TV with a single dead pixel out of the box, DVD player wherein the drawer would close by itself within 2 seconds of opening, etc. The crazy thing is that it all worked. It just didn't work properly.

I kept thinking I was having bad luck, so kept trying before finally declaring I wouldn't buy from there. I sincerely think they are/were selling used and/or known defective stuff as new. To make matters worse, the return process of our local store makes customers feel like criminals when just trying to get a refund for their crappy crap.

> I remember being able to buy all sorts of ICs, analog parts, interesting radios and kits.

They still do. Most radioshacks I've visited carry arduino kits and ICs, electronic parts, LEDs, resistors, capacitors, etc.

IME it depends on whether they're inside a mall or not. The ones inside malls tend to just be glorified mobile phone sales depots, but you can actually get components at the standalone ones.

A lot of the standalone stores are franchises, where most of the mall locations are corporate. Big difference.

They do, but it's one little corner of the store. It used to be at least a full aisle.

Remember the original Fry's in Sunnyvale? It was pretty much a cross between a 7-Eleven and a components store and not much bigger. I remember thinking to myself, that it was certainly a strange place. Then they built the big Sunnyvale store and it became the go-to place for me. But not in this century. The prices are too high, the service is terrible. I realized that it is faster and cheaper to go online.

I remember it and the Weird Stuff Warehouse right near it. Now Weird Stuff is out off Carribbean. Still fun to go visit.

I remember the bigger Sunnyvale store.

Back in the late 80s / early 90s, a friend and I used to go out there about once a year (usually after the Borland/CompuServe picnic, of all things) to shop around for upgrades. Compared to what was available in the back country of the San Joaquin valley, it was pretty cool.

More memories, made obsolete by change :-)

I go to the Fry's Palo Alto store, it has a decent selection of parts/components if you stay to the right half of the store. (Left hand side is all TVs and Sales guys yuck..) If you want a larger selection of electronic components in the Bay Area - HSC is hard to beat and they have a ton of weird stuff too.

Also, the Jameco warehouse on highway 101 is open to the public. Super handy for same-day printer filament, ICs, or just picking cheap shipping and getting it the next morning anyway.

And the lady at the will-call desk is a wonderful human being for being patient with me taking forever to fill an order.

I applied to work at a Radio Shack when I was 16. I didn't get a job there. The guy interviewing me spent most of the time making sure I knew the difference between being paid hourly, and being paid on commission, and making sure I really knew what a spiff was. In retrospect it was kind of weird. It was kind of weird at the time, too.

Reading these, I don't feel like I missed out on too much.

Radio Shack was always two stores in my memory. There was the legit geeky side with electronic parts, and there's the Realistic/Tandy side hawking so-so also-ran consumer electronics. The perspective always seemed to be that parts were sort of a loss-leader for consumables.

The employees almost never knew anything technical, and were often suspicious of nerdy kids like me lingering in the parts section. I remember one time I was building a circuit and needed a .22uF cap. I asked if a .22pF was the same (I was like 10 or 11). Instead of saying "I don't know" the sales guy just kind of stared at the package and then shrugged and said "Yep". My circuit did not work.

I hear people floating the idea of RS reinventing itself as more of a hacker-friendly place, but from an investor's perspective you'd be switching from a giant consumer market to a much smaller niche market. Personally, I think that's a great idea, but I'm not sure you could ever convince investors of that.

Ha ha, 0.2 pF are strictly RF SMT caps. Probably was 22 pF.

I think you're right, 22pF. Definitely wasn't anything SMT, this was 1984 or so.

I actually think RadioShack can turn things around. "Hacking" electronics is gaining ground esp with Arduino, Rpi, etc. Here's what I would do: - Beef up stock of "maker" electronics, Arduino's, Rpi, modules, kits etc. - Buy/build modules/kits, work with suppliers like SparkFun, Shmart, Adafruit for help in this area - Create "recipes" for building electronics and guide customers through purchasing the materials - Clear out all the rip-off electronics unless you are willing to match Amazon prices. - Get rid of smartphones, who buys these from Radio Shack??? - Most importantly, hold regular (weekly) free "maker sessions" for kids to learn principles of electronics and get them excited about it...similar to what Home Depot does

The more they focus on building/diy electronics the better, this is higher margin (and lower price) than simply retailing finished electronics, although they'll need to do some of that too I suppose.

If you've been to Radio Shack recently, they have a decent number of Arduino kits and the like.. however I don't think people are not dense enough to pay $60 for a kit you can purchase for $20 on Amazon. I think their was a point where they could have course corrected though I think they missed the exit half a decade ago.

I bet they'd pay 10 bucks an hour for shop time with access to tools and advice, and buy arduinos at a slight premium out of impatience to get projects done.

True they have a weak supply of Arduino stuff. Since its mostly open hardware they could probably source low cost kits instead of trying to gouge customers. I've been there recently and it took me all of 2 minutes to look through their entire inventory... Imagine an entire wall of different modules, sensors, servos, etc etc... that would get me in the store!

Radio Shack was my toy store as a kid, as far back as I can remember. My favorite toys were volt meters, little electric motors, power adapters, LEDs, bread boards, and those little electronics kits with the spring terminals. Radio Shack deserves some of the blame for making me who I am today. :)

Preach!

What saddens me most is that RadioShack was one of the pioneers that sparked the personal computer revolution. I can easily remember my first interactions with a TRS-80 (a clone - I live in Brazil), reading avidly their manuals, understanding how their block graphics worked and writing my own small programs I would go to a computer store to test.

It's a little bit tragic, but we all know RadioShack's time has passed. We appear to be living in a time of rapid transformation. RadioShack will soon no longer exist. Like payphones, printed newspapers and magazines and soon books and bookstores will follow the video rentals and record stores into history. Change can be difficult for those who live through it, but in return, we get stories to tell our grandkids.

It's not that bad a deal.

This isn't really a story about Radio Shack. It's about how awful it is to be a retail employee. You could have written this about the working conditions inside any retail store in any dying shopping mall: Forced to work off the clock, no overtime pay, pay structure resulting in pay below minimum wage, capricious, last-minute schedule changes, do-it-or-leave ultimatums, callous, abusive management, exhausted and overworked management, management-by-screaming-at-people, nonsensical rules and policies from corporate, revolving door for employees and management, and widespread apathy. Nothing here specific to Radio Shack, folks, this is the standard retail work environment in the USA.

I don't know if that's entirely accurate. I did a good stint of retail early in my college career and Radio Shack, at least in my experience, was on a whole different level.

I think the author nailed it on the head with this statement:

>Working at RadioShack was sort of the worst of two worlds: there was the poverty-level income of a blue-collar retail job, coupled with the expectations, political nonsense, and corporate soullessness of the white-collar environment.

There was a non-stop, life or death pressure from management to sell -- especially phones and "add ons." I was once written up for selling a phone without attaching 3 accessories.

One day the manager stuck a clipboard behind the counter with stack of paper on it. After every customer interaction, we were supposed to log What phone they had, what service they had, when they're due for an upgrade, and like 2-3 other things that I can't remember. Failure to do this would result in a write up, and eventual termination.

With a Target or Publix gig, you can more or less mind your own business and stock shelves -- helping customers is actually an awesome break from the monotony in that case. At Radio Shack, every customer interaction was painful because it was turned into an awkward interrogation.

Too widely variable to paint with such a broad brush. I've worked a number of retail gigs as a kid/young adult and had basically good experiences; from Ace Hardware to Walmart. (Never fast food though; managed to avoid that.)

It's not just the company is odd and off the mark. The bond holders are also screwy: http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-13/radioshack-lende...

The bond holders stopped them from closing unprofitable stores...

Honestly, I don't know what to make of the "news" of RS' imminent demise. Just 2 days ago I visited a nearby RS store and bought stuff there. The store was well-stocked and I wasn't the only customer in the store. The employees didn't have that unhappy, "short-timer" look either, that is, didn't emit even a whiff that the store was closing down.

Besides, there are at least 6 RS stores in this city, the furthest I know of being maybe 10 miles away, so I'm guessing there must be a few RS stores out there that I don't know about. Since they've all stayed in business for many years, they have to be selling some items or services or something.

I can report at least two positive aspects of my RS visit. The guy at the cash register actually knew something about the gear I was interesting in and could answer technical questions. Second, prices were low and the quality of items seemed pretty good.

So yeah, there are reasons I would hate to see them go...

Ah RadioShack, where I acquired Jazz Jackrabbit and a circuit board toy with my dad. It's sad that RadioShack isn't as fun as I remember it being, but last time I was in I saw a similar circuit board toy which is nice. It's always sad to hear that a company treats their employees as though they are no more than cattle tugging a plow.

I read this post, felt sorry for RadioShack, and decided I would give them one last shot and try their price matching policy for a pair of beats solo headphones. I hoped to avoid the long lines at some of the bigger retail outlets and, by utilizing their advertised "extra 10% off" price matching, avoid mail in rebates as well. Long story short, after waiting close to an hour for one of the two working associates to become available I was denied a price match. They ended up losing my sale because of this and leaving me wondering how they have lasted this long. I had a bit of sympathy for them earlier but the only sympathy I have left is for the people still working for them.

https://twitter.com/MatthewTavares/status/538138578208169984

As of today (Nov 26), Yahoo Finance shows RadioShack as having 3-ish billion USD in revenue, and a market cap of of 83 million USD. I guess there isn't a lot of faith on Wall St. that RadioShack is going to turn itself around.

My SO worked at RS corporate for a few years during late 2000s. The Internet is definitely what killed this company. They had loyalty with a older generation and that's how they survived until now. They never found out how to bring young people into the stores in an Internet age. That's what the whole "the shack" thing was all about. It failed. Now that loyal customer segment they did have is 1) aging out of the market 2) coming around to online shopping.

I can't really say much about how store ops ran, but I'm sure it was a result of the financial pressures the company was under just trying to survive.

In Canada radioshack rebranded itself as "The Source". I used to pop into radioshack to find plugs, adapters, and the occasional electronics component. They stopped carrying those years ago and now, if I want anything like that, I either drive across town to a hobby shop or order online. Since "The Source" now seems to specialize in overpriced junk, I haven't set foot in one for years. This article makes me feel good about that decision. It would be better for ratshack's workers to be out of a job and then in a job that treats them as human beings.

I guess one of Radio Shacks biggest problem is the same as most brick and mortar stores, many us just want to order it online have it show up.

They could have tried/could try to become the home tech store. Take your home to the newest level, LED lighting all around, wireless integration of home automation and security. Sharing video all around the home. Then show it off in store. Hell, sell solar panels or such, I don't care. Just give today's geek a reason to come in. I don't need a phone or a computer; but a specialized home automation turn key system... well...

Just tonight my father-in-law's new TV required a HDMI cable. He suggested RadioShack. I said "I'm going to Target. At RadioShack you have to talk to people."

The days of high-touch service are over.

I might like to talk to people if they weren't all hiding incompetence behind a sales pitch.

I shopped at RadioShack just one time in the '90s. I bought some walkie talkies, and the cashier insisted that I provide my name and address to make the purchase. I said I didn't want junk mail. He assured me that it was only for recordkeeping purposes and that my info wouldn't end up on a mailing list. Within weeks, I started receiving RadioShack catalogues and flyers. I'm pretty sure they spent more on postage, paper and ink over the next few years than I had originally spent on the walkie talkies.

Christ, I can't imagine what their corporate IT must be like.

Probably the Windows XP syndrome of never ever ever never investing into your infrastructure, but stretched over fourty years.

It's all TRS-80's with null modem cables, as far as the eye can see.

My earliest memory of Radio Shack(which is probably circa 1990, so even before the name change) is that I walked in accompanied by my mother and attempted to play the display miniature pinball game, and then was yelled at by the manager for this crime.

I've had better experiences, I even got a microSD from them the other day(after being tipped by a friend that they were cost competitive on this one item). But it has never been warm fuzzies.

Part of the fall of Radio Shack is that the market for discrete components isn't what it used to be. This is because not as many people take up electronics as a hobby. And that, in turn, is because a lot of people that would go into electronics, got sucked into computer programming instead. After all, the decline of Radio Shack coincides with the rise of affordable personal computers.

I still have a cuecat!!! I never intended to use it for it's intended purpose,but thought it was great to get a free bar code reader.

I always associated CueCat with WIRED magazine, I had no idea RadioShack was an investor.

Same here, and when Cranky Geeks was still going one of the regulars was Dave Mathews; who I always thought was the inventor. (And according to http://www.crunchbase.com/person/dave-mathews, he is.) Never heard of this Hutton Pulizer guy.

It saddens me to read this I bought my first computer from Radio Shack a Tandy 1000EX, it's now gutted and hanging on the wall above my desk,my nephew said,look mom a computer with a typewriter built into it !. Upon discovering ,how I memorialized my first computer , my nephew went on a search for his first phone..rest in peace RS.

The RadioShack employee I spoke with had no idea there was a Mini-Maker Faire in Portland. RadioShack could have had a presence there. When the company finally dies, where can you go to grab some Arduino kits or components? I hope another company takes its place. Places like BestBuy don't even carry cables, let alone components.

Here is a good blog post on the history of the TRS-80 that also discusses RadioShack's corporate culture. http://www.filfre.net/2011/06/the-trash-80-part-1/

Surprised that nobody has mentioned BatteriesPlus. Checking their website, they have at least 586 stores selling batteries - cell phone, laptop, car, etc. - and light bulbs.

Focusing in those areas seems exactly what RadioShack could and should have been doing.

Maybe I have a sad life otherwise, but I was laughing so hard sometimes. Thanks for this.

No matter what happens to RadioShack the stories were told masterfully. Stoned Craig is my hero, who reminds me of myself. Hacking the merchandise in an anti-social way is what being a RadioShack customer is all about!

If you think working on Thanksgiving is bad, the crummy retail store I work at (bookstore in Canada) is open New Years Day. Its actually open every day of the year except Christmas Day.

Oh RadioShack, I hardly knew ye. I do regret getting that crappy Virgin Mobile smartphone, which was the only thing I bought ever from a RadioShack. RIP in pieces.

"We all line up in expectation of hordes of customers. Six on one side of the store, six on the other side, pallbearers of an invisible casket." Lol.

for nostalgia sake

http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/catalog_directory.html

I just read a description of a business calibrated to "Kafka Settings", or at least a feature biography in "Zombie Business Today".

This reads like a revolting Douglas Coupland novel.

Well done.

<not_sarcastic/>

The person who wrote this seems reasonably intelligent. Why did he work at Radioshack for so long if it was so horrible?

One thing the local radioshack is good for is to recycle old batteries - will have to find a new place to do that.

This honestly reminds me of Sears Electronics Department, I worked there for 3 years.

Brum did not have a song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqsEHRfsp4k

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Food for thought: any organization is vulnerable to such stagnation and dysfunction, particularly when it was born for and evolved with a state of affairs that no longer exists. Either the organization must adapt, or it should die. Thankfully, the death of dysfunctional organizations is a given in free markets -- perhaps even a reason for bittersweet celebration.

Governmental organizations, in contrast, have no incentives to adapt, and no "recycling" mechanism. Failure is emphatically not an option. Worse, bureaucracy inevitably takes on the primary mission of preserving itself.

Your food for thought is hundreds of years old and getting a bit stale.

Nice bashing of a company fighting for their life. Point being it's easy if you are awash in profitability to do the right things, hire the best people in management, pay for the top consultants. [1] And of course give people massages and free lunch and all sorts of benies. Or if you have been funded with funny money that gives you "runway" to burn through.

The highest quality people don't generally decide they want to join a sinking ship (let's say a store manager or district manager). The quality people are either happy elsewhere already (and not looking) or they take advantage (as a general rule) of the better opportunities either because they can or because they are smart enough to recognize those opportunities and pursue them. At my first company there were people that didn't even show up for interviews. Maybe they saw the facility and didn't like the way that it looked.

Separately, presumably if the author had a better opportunity he wouldn't have suffered for "three and a half years as a RadioShack employee".

[1] But even then if your basic model is not viable you aren't going to stand a big chance of making it. This isn't something like "People still buy cars Chrysler just can't make a car that people want".

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