RadioShack Prepares Bankruptcy Filing | Hacker News Reader

RadioShack Prepares Bankruptcy Filing

wsj.com

205 pointsdewitt222 comments

A lot of people think RadioShack should have made the transition to internet sales, but I think that they actually started failing earlier, when they expanded into a non-technical market.

In the 80s and 90s I could go into a Radio Shack and buy resistors, fuses, soldering equipment, breadboards, various controllers and sensors, hard drives, processors: everything I needed to assemble an electronics project, fix a computer, make something.

But in the mid-late 90s they started switching over to a more general consumer model. Bins of parts were replaced by shiny cell-phone display cases. Knowledgeable fat bearded nerds were replaced by skinny college students working a retail job until they got their degree. The last time I went into a RadioShack I just wanted a potentiometer and they literally didn't have any electronics parts.

The tragedy here is that this transition completed at about the same time the maker movement started to emerge a little after the turn of the millennium.

What's even more tragic is that Radio Shack realized they needed to get makers back, and when they started expressing a desire to do so a lot of makers were initially enthusiastic.

But I don't think they ever really grokked what makers would want out of a local brick-and-mortar. They never did fix the sorry state of their loose component selection. The parts drawers are still stocked with 50% stereo equipment parts they haven't been able to sell since 1992, 20% automotive fuses they haven't been able to sell since 1995, 15% standard capacitor sizes for ancient stereo equipment, and 15% components a modern maker might actually need. They should have written all that stuff down and then taken a look at adafruit.com to see what components a 21st century maker wants to buy.

Yes, they did expand their selection of microcontrollers and kit projects, but that's all stuff we've long since gotten used to ordering online. It won't drive feet through the door. They needed to be backing that up with the kinds of stuff a DIYer might want to buy on short notice. A 2015 DIYer, not a 1985 one.

The 2015 maker market is tiny compared to the 1985 one.

In the the UK the 1985 market was big enough to keep a handful of magazines in comfortable five digit sales, and an area of London - Edgware Road - had a component store ghetto where you could almost any part you wanted. (The tiny selection of components sold by RadioShack at ludicrous prices compared, to the epic lists offered by the ghetto shops, made RS a bit of a bad joke in the UK, even back then.)

There was almost no difference between 1985 product tech and 1985 hobby tech. In theory you could build almost any product you could buy out of standard parts, so there was always the incentive - or at least an excuse - that DIY would save you money. (Some people built amazing things to save money.)

In 2015, there's no way you can build an iPhone, a laptop, a games console or an MP3 player from scratch with a soldering iron and a bag of parts.

(If you look at Elektor, one of the surviving hobby mags, you'll see it's full of complicated, difficult hobby projects by full-time engineers. You need a lot more than a soldering iron and a cheap meter to build them.)

Bottom line is that the Arduino/Pi/Beagle/etc microcontroller market is nowhere near the size needed to keep a huge chain like RadioShack profitable.

And there's enough competition in consumer electronic sales to make it almost impossible to offer any other USP.

Add toxic management to the mix, and I'm amazed the company lasted as long as it did.

I won't miss RadioShack. I hope some smaller mom&pop enthusiast stores take over some of the same space - and that they treat customers and staff with much more respect and affection than RS ever did.

Adafruit is awesome, but it's not remotely a replacement for a brick and mortar store. When I went to RadioShack in the early 90s I would pick the core part of what I wanted and then walk around the store visually matching parts to make sure things fit.

This is somewhat less necessary now that there are more standardized connections between things, but it's still nice and it's something Adafruit can't possibly replicate.

They'd still go out of business. Not only is that market for components like that small, the profit margins are too. You'd have to stock a very wide selection of items.

And there's established mail order dealers with cheap overnight shipping and cavernous warehouses (i.e.: Digikey) that have the volume to keep those margin very thin.

started failing earlier, when they expanded into a non-technical market.

Radio Shack was dead when the 80s ended. Look around, where are the small computer stores that used to be all over the place? They went the same way the record store did...

Radio Shack works in an era where computers are $10000, and people build and solder their own computers.

That era is gone. And that's why Radio Shack will die.

Pretending that the 80s market still exists is delusional... and completely ignores all of the companies that clung to that business model that died 10-20 years ago.

I missed the heyday of computing, but I was a kid in the 1990's and still remember going to radio shack to get resistors. I think as we grew out of it, that enthusiast market never really got replenished. My wife has two much younger siblings (13-14) and it's actually kind of surprising how they're less computer literate than we are (30-31). They use Snapchat and whatnot, but don't even know how to make more complicated search queries in Google.

Little bit nostalgic about the BK though. My first real computer was a Tandy we bought at RadioShack: https://parasomia.wordpress.com/2010/03/14/the-tandy-sensati.... I'm pretty much the guy in the article. Eventually maxed it out with 16MB of RAM, a 1.2GB HDD, and Win95.

I don't think you can draw too many conclusions based on those observations. The fact you're posting on Hacker News makes you atypical for your generation.

Look at people like Palmer Luckey. He revived VR and kick started an entire industry from his parents garage when he was 18.

I think we're in living in a pretty amazing time for computing. We're still figuring out what the next wave of computing will look like. Programmers can bootstrap apps and games that reach millions of people without breaking a sweat. Programming is more accessible than ever. I'd chose today over the 80's in a heartbeat.

In the last 5 years Microcenter has been expanding their selection of electronics tools, kits, and parts. Not to mention Fry's which has always carried a selection of electronics tools and parts. They've essentially picked up the market that Radio Shack dropped.

There's one Fry's in a city. There used to be dozens of Radio Shacks. It's a very different model. Radio Shack would have had to close 9 out of 10 stores, and turned the remaining one into some sort of superstore.

I'm not saying that's not what should have happened (though the big box stores are now beginning to see the writing on the wall, as much of their business goes online), or that it wouldn't have extended the life of the Radio Shack brand another five, ten, maybe more, years. But, it would have also been the end of the Radio Shack of my childhood (then again, that Radio Shack died years ago anyway).

Microcenter is pretty awesome (has its flaws but it's basically what I always wished Best Buy and the like could be.

It ain't gonna happen but Microcenter doesn't have locations in many areas so I'd love it if they bought up a bunch of the little Radio Shacks and turned them into spinoff/satellite "Nanocenters" or some such. Maybe just stock the small stuff (hobbyist electronics and other things that don't take up a load of space) and rotate in the most popular/in-demand items from their normal stock.

The volume and low margins of their bigger stores would help with costs that would be harder if they were only the smaller shops but it would be a cheaper way to bring computer hardware and other electronics to brick-and-mortar stores that are closer to more customers.

I realize this would probably be a mess and never work due to market changes but it's a nice fantasy.

Have you seen Fry's selection of electronic components lately? There are 3 within a 30 minute drive of me, and I visited all 3 of them in one day trying to find a component without having to order it online. Their selection was not any better than the local Radio Shacks. The selection of components at RS were in drawers and was not impressive. The selection at Fry's was also not as impressive, but since they were just on hangers on a fairly large amount of real estate, all of the bags were yellowed and nasty looking. Some of there stuff even had a layer of dust on them.

I'm not trying to bag on Fry's, but I would not be surprised if their component selection gets eliminated to make space for refrigerators, microwave ovens, and color TVs.

Perhaps it is a niche market. That said, I was really looking for some brick and mortar resources for a ham radio, some coax, and some resitors/circuit kits the other day. I actually thought of RadioShack, but thought "no, I'm not looking for a cell phone."

There is still a market, though small, that RadioShack gave up on.

You got the cause and effect backwards. They expanded into non-technical markets because the technical market was failing.

>resistors, fuses, soldering equipment, breadboards, various controllers and sensors, hard drives, processors: everything I needed to assemble an electronics project, fix a computer, make something.

Almost nobody uses any of these. Those who do it as a hobby and don't wanna pay corner store retail for products. Microcenter is essentially the only one selling half that stuff and they can support like 1 store per major metro area. And they don't even really sell resistors and sensors.

Nobody repairs electronics anymore.

The tiny niche maker movement could support a radioshack like store. But radioshack is a corner store. More like 7-11 than a microcenter.

They have to tell resister for 400 bucks to keep 5 thousand stores open.

Actually the Microcenter near me (Chicago), has expanded their selection of electronic components significantly in the past couple of years. What once was one rack is now an entire wall, with Sparkfun, Adafruit, Parallax, and Seeedstudio stuff, Arduinos, Beaglebones, and Raspberry Pis, and plenty of resistors, transistors, and other individual parts.

I have fun memories of the one on the Northside. My harddrive failed during finals and I had to go out that night and get one.

I actually paid for Xubuntu there hilariously enough. Paid like 2 bucks for a CD with it, so I could go online and download windows.

Now we just need same day drone delivery for them and Fry's. That would be so handy.

The last time I went to a RadioShack, I was looking for a resistor. I checked their website, which said my local store had it in stock. When I got there, I found the electronic components stuffed in a dark corner and the smaller components were all mixed up in the wrong drawers. After a few minutes of searching, I didn't find the resistor I needed, so I asked the only employee in the store where it might be. She told me that if it wasn't in the drawer, they don't have it. I said "But your website says it's in stock," to which she replied "Oh we never update that."

I always call the store to confirm if the website is correct. And half the time, they don't have in stock what the website claims. That may be why the employees are so eager and helpful in looking for the part.

> The tragedy here is that this transition completed at about the same time the maker movement started to emerge a little after the turn of the millennium.

Maybe it's simpler than that. For makers, maybe Radio Shack succeeded because there was no internet yet. Once the internet really took hold, there was absolutely no need for a Radio Shack (at least no what Radio Shack traditionally was).

If that's the case, then RS was doomed no matter what they did. Maybe they even saw that coming, and tried to survive (although fail they did) by shifting away from that disappearing business.

It's ironic that on a nearby block there was once a Radio Shack next door to Blockbuster. Both of them could not overcome the competition brought upon by the Internet.

Actually, even though many people think like this I don't think Radio Shack made the wrong move. Before the internet you needed a place like Radio Shack for all the electronics and super early computer guys. But nerds (like me) moved to software and the few remaining people still building physical stuff could generally get the parts they needed online.

Radio Shack actually tried to move back into resistors and Raspberry PIs, but nobody goes to a physical store to buy that stuff anymore.

Radio Shack wasn't large enough in most malls to offer a variety of home electronics like Best Buy, but cell phones were high margin and viewed as a commodity by consumers, which is why they moved into them. It isn't simple saving Radio Shack. They probably would have been better off splitting the brand into a small store (Radio Shack) and a larger box store where they could have competed more effectively.

I think their expansion was actually quite brilliant. The store ended up selling just the high-margin items (cords, accessories, etc) that stores like Best Buy and Circuit City would upsell to offset the cost of low-margin, big-ticket items.

The only thing I can think of that could have helped them prolong their agony is to join with the iFixits or iCrackeds of the world --back in the early 2000s maybe had they been the 'geeksquad' then again, maybe not. But they didn't even try...

Yeah, it's a classic case of a company not believing in itself. Had Radio Shack owned its identity as a maker shop, it would be thriving today.

I'm sure somewhere in all this there's a group of MBA consultants. I can smell it.

A lot of people think RadioShack should have made the transition to internet sales

Huh? Like http://www.radioshack.com/

Pretty sure parent was implying they should close down their massive brick-and-mortar retail presence.

Yes.

Nobody seems to have a good answer for what RS should become to avoid shutting down. The most common answer is to go back to its roots and embrace the maker market and stock up on things like 3d printers, breadboards and arduinos. I think this is the wrong idea, since the market is nowhere near large enough to support the vast amounts of stores RS has.

I think if I was the CEO, I would focus on being a boutique shop for neat stuff. Kind of like a brookstone for electronics. They would have google glass, nest, wearables, smart home stuff. They would have things you cant buy at best buy like high end headphones and microphones. Not only that, but it would have knowledgeable staff who could tell me why I should go with the Denon headphones and the Fiio amplifier and skip the sonys. Broadly, alot of the type of stuff you see on kickstarter would feel like their inventory.

Yes, you would have 3d printers and filament in the store also, but the new RS store would not revolve around that- It would be there because it was 'cool'. I would much rather see way less capacitors and fuses and more fuut hammocks and 4th design titanium iphone cases.

But you would also see high end stuff you normally cant buy in best buy because its too expensive to have the inventory floated to all their stores. There is a surprising amount of laptops that are 'too high end' to ever show up in BB and only rarely appear in microsoft stores. That is also the case with audio equipment in spades.

Thats a store I would go to.

I write a bit more about this here : http://harknesslabs.com/post/108193041064/how-to-save-radio-...

"But you would also see high end stuff you normally cant buy in best buy because its too expensive to have the inventory floated to all their stores."

While I admire what you came up with there are 2 big problems working against this:

First, I can buy nearly all the high end stuff you list at my local Best Buy. Beats by Dre, Bose, Nest, iPads & iPhone 6+'s, Flagship Samsung phones/smart watches, Thinkpad laptops, high end receivers, etc. Some of the pro audio stuff (amps, mics, etc) isn't top-top, but for that honestly you are better off at a music equipment stores. So they would have to go uber high end, and that's just not going to happen with their current brand image. That market is also insanely small and needs a correspondingly small footprint. Even closing 90% of their stores may not be enough.

Second is store size and location. Best Buys are enormous. They can have the high end glam to get people in the door, and still have room for the mid grade consumer stuff most people buy. These stores are larger yes, but rent/square foot are way cheaper than a little 1000 - 1500 sq ft Radio Shack. Street frontage and site location are terrible for radio shack. The closest one to me in Atlanta is sandwiched between a UPS store and a nail salon, at the very end of a strip mall with a grocery store as an anchor. Foot traffic must be terrible.

Boutique might could work, but a huge number of tiny retail shops are a giant albatross around Radio Shack's neck.

Here in the UK, Maplin Electronics are debt free and profitable with a fundamentally similar business model to the old Radio Shack. Piles of radio control cars and weather stations at the front of store, cables and miscellaneous electronics accessories in the middle, components at the back. Maplin thrive on their lack of focus - you go there when you need a Lighting cable or an RJ45 faceplate, and you leave with what you came for plus something you didn't know you even wanted.

It seems to me that the only real difference is the quality of management. Maplin were struggling in the 90s, but were bought out by a private equity firm who turned the business around. There were no radical changes in direction, just a lot of incremental improvements to their core business.

I think that Radio Shack have far too many stores, and the management is fixated on finding a silver bullet for the company's woes. The complaints I hear about Radio Shack seem to be mainly issues of basic merchandising and customer service - their stock is erratic and outdated, their staff are indifferent and poorly trained. If your basic pitch is "we know you can buy this stuff online for less, but we offer convenience and service" then you actually need to follow through on the latter.

While this is a cool idea for a store, does it really fit with the assets that Radio Shack has? Here's what I see they've got to work with:

- lots of retail stores in crappy locations. There's no way I'll hear the difference between a Grado and a Sony when the juicer at Orange Julius is echoing down the hallway. It would be perfect for 3d printers, though.

- Cheap, non-committed workers. I'm not sure it would be worth training everyone there how to use a 3D printer if they only stay there a year. Also, not everyone there would be able to sell hifi; definitely not better than the blue-shirts can.

- A good supply chain of custom-branded products. This used to be their bread-and-butter, but no one wants Enercell batteries anymore.

- A brand name that has been diluted. I know Brookstone is great for craptastic stuff, but it would take a lot to re-educate people on the new RS.

I think the point is, there current business model of catering to low end clientele is NOT working. They need to reinvent themselves and this is what I feel has the most legs of keeping them alive. The margin for high end goods is much more palatable than selling power strips.

The long and the short of it is, RS needs to radically change everything about themselves and go for broke. Trying to do slow changes while holding onto a legacy business will just leave them in a situation like compusa.

Right. So close down the legacy business and start something new. Whether you do so within the existing corporate structure is for the lawyers and investment bankers to decide. Pop quiz: What's Woolworth's these days?

> Cheap, non-committed workers.

Isn't that the case with 99% of retail? I'd think any executive that proposed paying retail workers a living wage with predictable hours would get fired as a traitor in the War on Employees.

Yeah I worked there in the early 2000's for maybe 6-8 months. It was miserable. Having any technical knowledge or interest in learning new things was zero help at all. All they cared about was how many new cell contracts you sold and as this was the only way to make more than minimum wage, we were quickly broken down and begrudgingly pushed those contracts and upsold those extras.

The whole place was terribly hostile to employees and we actually had to drive out of town once a month for "sales meetings" where a bunch of middle management patted each other on the back and talked about the new acronyms for whatever their current dipshit strategy was to squeeze a few more points of growth onto this month's charts.

The risk is that it could become an expensive immersive 3d catalog for stuff you could buy online for a fraction of their prices. It would need some sort of exclusivity deal with several high end brands to be viable.

> Nobody seems to have a good answer for what RS should become to avoid shutting down.

Sell Teslas?

Make their own e-car and sell those? They have Tesla as an existence proof, so they don't have the risk that Tesla took. And they could probably license Tesla IP.

Maybe they could be the down market e-car. And with all those retail locations, maybe they could replace batteries, or charge batteries, or even swap out your whole car. "My battery's dead, gimme another car."

Go the Brookstone way? Did you see what happened to sharper image?

Their main asset was brand recognition, and a network of retail stores. But that network didn't fit with what they were selling anymore.

I think a good strategy would have been to spin off the brick and mortar business and focus almost exclusively on online sales of products targeted at the maker community Arduinos, 3D printers, etc.

That would be great! Maybe even combining maker items with the Kickstarter-type hardware. Another option is to offer electronics workshops to generate value from their physical space. Also, electronics/robotics parties for kids would be interesting.

That could be the best move out of a bunch of bad choices. But I could just order any of the specialty items you listed online.

You definitely could- But that of course holds true for best buy as well. The draw is that walking into a Radio Shack could be 'cool' again. See the latest gear that just came out. If they really embraced it, it would have the same feeling as walking into a high end audio shop. RS needs to become a master of something in order to be trusted. Right now, they are focusing entirely on being a jack of all trades and failing at that

Last time I was at a Radio Shack, I was just starting to learn electronics. I bought parts to build a battery-powered guitar amplifier: LM386 IC, a small loud speaker, a handful of capacitors and resistors, a roll of wire, a project enclosure, a couple of potentiometers, knobs for them, and a switch. Just the sort of stuff one would expect to find at a Radio Shack (though, increasingly, cannot find). The store manager checked me out and made some crack about, "what are you making? Some kind of bomb?"

This was around the time that the city of Boston decided to go completely nutso and assume everything that had a wire sticking out of it was a bomb, find the people who made it, and then destroy their lives for "making a bomb hoax", regardless of what the item actually was. I had a flash of an image in my head of some soccer mom walking by the store in the mall, hearing the "bomb" quip, and calling the cops to send in the SWAT team.

I didn't expect the manager to know that speakers and amplifier chips don't go in a bomb. I mean, he was a manager at a Radio Shack, we're not talking about the cream of the crop here. But I did expect him to have a little tact and not make the sort of stupid jokes that our trigger-happy, security-theater-conscious society has demonstrated a gleeful willingness to destroy lives over.

I worked at RadioShack for 2 years in college in 2003 and I can say with out a doubt that the upper management lead the downfall of that company. They abandoned their core customers of electronics hobbyists and turned there employees into salesmen. I got paid $5.50 an hour but was told that was OK because I made commissions from cell phone sales which maybe upped my pay to $6.00 on a good day. No wonder there constantly rated as one of the worst companies to work for... If they would have paid employees better they may have been able to get people that could actually help customers and they might still be around today. Good bye RadioShack, I won't miss you.

Funny, I applied to work there around the same time. I was working at a deli at the time, making $7/hr, thinking "man there has to be something better." I thought of how I liked going to Radio Shack when I was younger, and how it might be a good experience to work there.

The day I went to apply, they asked if I'd be OK making commissions. I asked what the base was, and they replied something similar to $5/hr. I asked what commissions came from, the manager said "everything!"

On my way out, one of the employees stopped me and told me they collectively barely made any commissions and to stay where I was. I went in there quite a few times after that and never saw the same people working. I guess they had a lot of turnover.

It's almost like upper management went out of their way to irritate employees and customers? I had a manager literally follow me out the store trying to get me to buy a cell phone. I never understood the Tie requirement--it's a electronics store? I applied in high school, but lasted one day with a angry local manager.(I don't blame the local manager--he had two, or three jobs at the time). I knew the problem was that upper management was stuck in the 50's; much like Sears?

Don't forget how you had to sell a certain amount every day for a week in order to even qualify for commission/bonus/spiff/whatever they were calling it that week. Then they wouldn't schedule you for enough hours/shifts to possibly meet that number.

And don't you just miss the Sunday sales meetings where you had to drive someplace and listen to some suit go on about HOTASSS or whatever the stupid acronym was?

Tandy companies' management has always been insane.

Having moved to Australia in recent years, I was very happy to see that JayCar, their equivalent to Radio Shack, seemed to be doing quite well. This is judging by what I've seen of the stores in what is considered a fairly backwards part of Australia (Queensland).

The difference seems to be two-fold. First, Jaycar didn't go through an insane expansion (there are only 12 or so locations per state). Second, they've grown "out" from their core market of electronics hobbyist instead of betraying it. Just a few examples: custom car stereos, solar panel accessories, camping/RV electronics, boating electronics, and DJ-stuff like laser projectors. This is all in addition to the arduino and 3D printing stuff that you'd expect. There's a huge amount of cross-over between these markets, which works out great for Jaycar.

There is one additional factor keeping Jaycar healthy that probably shouldn't be underplayed. Due to mining and a less crypto-facist view of unions, Australia has not (yet) completely gutted it's blue-collar market and culture. Jaycar advertises almost exclusively to this "tradie" (as the Australians call it) demographic. Jaycar is marketed as a "manly" thing, not a "nerd" or "tech" thing. In fact, it's even drummed up minor controversy from feminist as being exclusionary with ads focusing on "leaving her to go to your man-cave" and whatnot. This part of Jaycar's success probably can't be replicated stateside. The market of people who have the skills to fix a small electric outboard motor and can still afford one died with the rest of blue-collar culture and jobs.

Another thing that probably helped is that Dick Smith Electronics moved out of that space and became Yet Another Consumer Electronics Store.

It's almost as if Dick Smith made exactly the same mistake as RS.

Likewise, in the UK, the dozens of Maplin stores remain places where it's possible to pick up components for electronics projects, alongside the kinds of other electronic products you mention. Evidently, there does remain a place in the world for stores of this kind, whatever can be offered online.

That's interesting. The UK also has more protections for small contractors (e.g. electricians, welders, etc.). I wonder if that's the common thread (meaning it's basically impossible to replicate in the US) or if Radical Hack could have stayed alive if it had just doubled down.

The overgrowth factor shouldn't be ignored though. It's a particularly sad effect of MBA-culture and perverse incentives that so many perfectly viable retail outlets grow themselves to death. Krispy Kreme is the perfect example of a chain that was obviously working and did everything it could to kill itself with growth. I sympathize that everyone involved in those decisions made ones that were rational for them and their personal gains, it's just a sad outcome for the chain.

How much different are retail vs internet prices in AUS?

I just imagine because of AUS (relative) isolation, that internet transactions aren't much cheaper than retail.

Pure speculation.

The difference is significant, but if you need two resistors it's $0.50 each, or a bag of 100 from the internet for $5 + shipping + waiting, then having 98 left over. Unless it's a particularly common part you'll never use the 98, so you've spent $4 more.

One of my favorite writers covered his tenure at RadioShack back in the early/mid augts

http://www.sbnation.com/2014/11/26/7281129/radioshack-eulogy...

It's one of the funniest/most heartbreaking articles I have ever read, but also explains a lot about RadioShack's slow spiraling collapse.

HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8663729

This is a wonderful story. A management clusterfudge all the way.

I'm confused by him saying that you don't get commissions until hitting a threshold that he "barely" hit once, and then a paragraph later he talks about someone returning phones that got him a $40 commission (so he now loses that commission).

It is actually likely as bad as you'd imagine. Think about how you could rationalize paying minimum wage, but then docking the pay. Give up? Read the comment by `pud in another thread a couple months back:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8665082

The shorter seems to be that they were always on commision, with a default of minimum wage. Should a return occur, the commision would be removed, even if that dropped them below minimum wage.

EDIT: Note further in the thread that a Canadian worker always got minimum wage. So it's possible the sleaze varied by region.

In countries with working legal systems, minimum wage means what it says, so removing the commission to drop pay below minimum wage levels would be illegal, and likely to be enforced.

I think that they got a sales commission for everything sold after a threshold, but they always got a commission for mobile phones in particular (likely through the carrier).

That's an amazing story. I had no idea how screwed up Radio Shack's management was. I knew they didn't have much business sense, but this is required reading.

Let's stop with all the nostalgia for the Radio Shack of old. They haven't been that way for 20 years. Their management has completely misread the market, they abuse their employees, they offer nothing you can't get elsewhere, usually at better prices, and, frankly, they have become like your crazy uncle: prone to doing something odd, smells bad, and is constantly embarrassing the family.

Stick a fork in them, they're done. They won't be missed because there is nothing there to miss.

Even at 35, I have a weird feeling like I'm walking into a religious cult or being watched when I'm in these stores. I've avoided going into them since I was young and this has persisted to this day. It has to do with the creepy, overzealous way the employees interact with you and the panopticon-like layout of the stores. I only go to Radio Shack as a last resort and won't miss them.

On the plus side, having lived in California and seen the magic fun that is Fry's, the minor vacuum left behind by RS might leave door open for something better. If not, I suppose I can wait a whole 48 hours for something from Prime.

I'm amazed they lasted this long. There's a Radio Shack two doors down from my office. I go in about 5x/year to buy batteries, USB cables or such stuff. Each time there's a new manager. Or a new clerk. Some are polite; some don't bother -- but nobody has a clue.

The stores seem totally dependent on weird promotions (buy 16 batteries; get 8 free) or copycat cell-phone deals in an era where there's always a specialized AT&T or Verizon store within a two minute walk. Meanwhile, they've deskilled the places to the point that customers can get much better advice from the reviews on Amazon than from a Radio Shack clerk.

A new RadioShack store JUST opened around the corner from me a few weeks ago. I assume it was a short term holiday season thing.

Typical big-company clumsiness. The store-opening expert didn't get the memo about a possible bankruptcy filing. Or if it did arrive, our go-getter decided that the best way to avoid getting fired was to be right in the middle of a project that couldn't be canceled.

I'm assuming that upper management wants things to be "business as usual" until the filing, otherwise the news would leak.

Bankruptcy doesn't necessarily mean close everything down. Perhaps that location is perceived as having a chance at profitability.

Radio Shack cannot make money selling hobbyist things to support their expensive retail locations. We all love that kind of stuff but admit it, that business has gone online to places like Adafruit. Even hardcore electronic component retailers that were in low rent industrial parks, or in my case a guy that operated out of his basement when he could not afford the rent in his industrial park have closed.

For years cell phones and people not smart enough to order cables from Monoprice and the like had powered their business. People like me would go to Radio Shack to buy emergency things like a common transistor, or solder, and also to gobble up their ancient hobbyist stuff on clearance.

There is no model for small electronics stores anymore selling any type of good. Hell even the big box places like Best Buy are under immense pressure from online retailers.

I live in Toronto, Canada where there are a bunch of independent stores that sell hobbyist electronics and seem to make a good profit doing so, so the market isn't dead. I like to buy stuff online but there have been plenty of times where I've been stuck needing a sensor, resistor, or things of that sort, and don't want to wait for 2 weeks for it to ship from China. It's a false premise to say that electronic component sales moved online when these isn't much in the way of a flagship brick and mortar location to purchase these goods. RS made a choice to move away from a potentially growing market, a market that they owned and could have expanded, and inevitably pushed their customers online.

Just my 2c, but I'm amazed that they thought they would move in on BestBuy (and FutureShop in Canada) territory and be able to compete.

I don't disagree, but there is a scale issue Radio Shack has. As a quick example:

Population of Toronto, Canada: 2.5 million.

From http://wheretobuy.klab.ca/ I see seven stores mentioned for electronic components.

Population (not including the large college population which perhaps adds another 33%) of the county where I live: 155,400.

Number of Radio Shack stores at present: 3. (There used to be two more.)

Even assuming the list for Toronto is only half of the relevant stores, Radio Shack would have to close down a lot of stores to resize similarly for the hobbyist market.

You posted a website that lays out relevant electronic components supply stores in an easy to digest manner. The problem I see is that the average hobbyist might not know where to start without first knowing about that site.

For instance, I used to buy computer parts from BestBuy because it was easy, they were everywhere, and I didn't know about the smaller stores that were better priced and staffed with generally more knowledgeable staff. I knew about BestBuy because it had a large brand identity, and could market to the general population. RS was large enough to market their business stream to the general population, while these smaller stores can not.

When it comes to sourcing components, you are left to do the research if you want to buy from brick and mortar. If you want to buy a tablet or gaming console come to BestBuy because they told me they have everything.

I still think RS had a great model in hobby electronic, and I really think they could have developed that model, not only for their own financial gain, but to the betterment of society. I didn't find out about hobby electronics until I was in my late teens and more substantially early 20's studying Engineering, probably because it was never effectively marketed towards me.

There was, at their peak, around twenty Radio Shack stores in Toronto. They were one of the few retailers in the 1980s and 1990s that would sell you one of something. Larger distributors were harder to deal with, and were geared towards thousands.

Now there's about a dozen stores that sell components to the hobbyist community and university students that need parts for projects. They have a selection way better than Radio Shack ever did.

It's not how many people live in a town that's the factor: It's how many university students you have. The more universities, the more likely you are to have an electronics savvy population. Perhaps the unusually high concentration where you are is due to that factor.

I'll note they're closing one, and of the three, it was the one that still had electronic parts bins. (Admittedly, one of the two others stocks a number of computer parts one might be desperate for, notably replacement power supplies.)

I live near Baynesville Electronics[1] and somehow they've managed to stay in business for a really long time selling stuff that RadioShack couldn't seem to competently sell. (The 50 years part of their sign has been up there at least 10 years).

They do a surprising amount of business from local engineering firms, AV/network/cable installers, and little IT shops because where else are you going to get a 25 pair Amphenol connector, a quad op-amp, some colored heatshrink tubing, obscure batteries, and a 1% 27.1kohm resistor at 9am on a Saturday? They are expensive compared to online retailers (for small parts), but they carry Arduino and RPi and the cool-kids stuff too at only a small markup.

As a kid, the closest electronics shop to me was RadioShack (Radio Shack then) (and it was my favorite place to go). It was right next to where I got my hair cut and in the same shopping center as the grocery store, so I got to go at least every other week. Back then, they had two (maybe three) aisles of electronic components, copper clad PCBs for etching, ferric chloride by the gallon, both 40xx and 74xx series logic in DIP packages; all sorts of stuff. I haven't been in an RS for a long time, but last time I was there I couldn't even find a barrel connector and they used to have a dozen different sizes. Even in the early 90s I guess RS was an expensive store - a five pack of resisters was $0.50 or a dollar - but ordering on the Internet wasn't an option and mail-order was difficult if you didn't have a business account.

I miss what they used to be, but the state of the hobby has changed - most things center around a microcontroller now (RS never carried any in my recollection, though they did have some EPROMS ... maybe they had an 8051?) and I can do things with a half dozen discrete components and an Arduino in a few hours that would have required twenty or thirty TTL logic chips, wirewrap sockets, and a whole weekend not so very long ago.

I wish there existed something like a fusion between the traditional hobbyist electronics store and a modern hackerspace. Some place where I could go to rent time on a 3D printer, CNC machine or reflow oven and also buy the missing parts I need and get advice on whatever I'm working on.

I think the market still exists for walk-in hobby electronics stores, though I grant it's not an easy market to survive in. I don't have the answers, maybe the folks who own Baynesville do.

[1]http://www.baynesvilleelectronics.com/index2.ivnu

A lot of things can work at small scale that don't work at Radio Shack public company scale.

Example. There's a board game store in Harvard Square that has been there forever. I assume it must make enough money for its owners to have stayed in business all these years. That doesn't mean that opening hundreds or thousands of such stores across the country would be a brilliant business plan. The same applies to the individual model stores, comic book stores, aquarium stores, etc. across the country. I suspect few make a lot of money--and it probably still gets harder rather than easier--but they can work on an individual basis.

You must be talking about The Games People Play[1].

Long ago I bought things there such as the D&D boxed set and the Chivalry & Sorcery[2] rules. Another purchase I made there was a Magic Cube, imported from Hungary before the worldwide release as Rubik's Cube. These first cubes were heavier than the widely-released ones[3].

Great store, glad that it's still around.

[1] http://www.thegamespeopleplaycambridge.com/ [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chivalry_%26_Sorcery [3] http://www.rubiks.com/history

Yep. I'm not really in a board game crowd but I still look in from time to time.

There's a term for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifestyle_business

Lots of (good) restaurants fall into this category.

Yes, even though it's an abused term that covers everything from a thriving small-scale full-time business with reasonable hours, to making enough bucks to hang out on the beach for 6 months a year, to barely making it in spite of 80 hour weeks, to labors of love that fit in there someplace.

I graduated from high school in the 80s. My first computer was a TRS-80 WITH a cassette tape to save my programs to. How RS went from being ubiquitous to a laughing stock is beyond me, but I remember seeing the downfall during the 90s when they started offering really cheap toys (like remote controlled cars).

They almost became embarrassing.

While I share your sentiment, in actuality they were likely already a laughing stock in 1985 when this Jobs interview ran, "Radio Shack is totally out of the picture. They have missed the boat. Radio Shack tried to squeeze the computer into their model of retailing, which in my opinion often meant selling second-rate products or low-end products in a surplus-store environment." http://longform.org/stories/playboy-interview-steve-jobs

I find there's a lot of romantic nostalgia. I accept that there are doubtless examples where Radio Shack stores were hubs for ham radio or electronics activity or whatever. And, certainly, the average skills of Radio Shack employees are a lot lower than they were at one time. But Radio Shack always sold huge quantities of crap (e.g. laughable stereo gear) to people who mostly didn't know any better along with generally overpriced cables etc. at a time when random components weren't necessarily all that easy to find elsewhere.

I remember Radio Shack being useful when I needed an adapter or a cable. But I can't say that I ever particularly loved the place.

Yours is the first comment mentioning the TRS-80. Currently it's halfway down the page.

I find this a bit surprising as the TRS-80 had a huge impact on the PC industry. It was the first PC that was easy to buy since Radio Shack stores were widespread.

Although derided as the "Trash-80," it was enormously popular for a time: "Still forecasting 3,000 sales a year, the company sold over 10,000 TRS-80s Model Is in its first one and a half months of sales…" [1]

According to the Wiki entry, it was released with two bundles, the bare unit at $399 and $599 with monitor and tape storage unit. Adjusted for inflation, that's $1,555 and $2,334.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80#History

My first computer was also a TRS-80 from Radio Shack. We'd go to Radio Shack to get new game cartridges, new cassette tape games, magazines with actual code in them (!), and even an upgrade from 8K to 16K RAM.

Those days are long gone. I understand why they got into selling other stuff, but now one can get all that other stuff elsewhere, often at lower cost…

Radio Shack has a warm place in my childhood: the Radio Shack Battery Club.

As a poor nerdlet in the early 80s, all my electronic projects were built with scavenged parts. Even so, I needed batteries. Batteries were not cheap - say compared to buying a gallon of milk for the family.

So, I had my parents and siblings sign up with me for the Radio Shack battery club at the two Radio Shacks nearby. These battery cards entitled you to a free battery once a month. My family supported my habit - and between the two stores and our cards - I had a steady supply of batteries. Those batteries powered my devices and my development as an engineer.

The first time I saw Fry's and WeirdStuff in the Bay Area in the early 90s, I think my heart skipped multiple beats. Seeing a DigiKey catalog for the first time had a similar effect.

I haven't stepped in a RS in more than a decade. I am sorry to see them go.

Are paywalls ok on HN?

http://uk.businessinsider.com/r-radioshack-prepares-to-file-...

At least for this item, the paywall that gives you the first paragraph and first bit of the 2nd is OK, the simple fact that's the situation has gone from the well known dire state to "reliably rumored" to do a bankruptcy and roughly when is all we really need.

A tip: Try searching the title on Google. They seem to give you some free articles per day when you come through a Google search.

I've also had success searching for the exact URL in Google. It usually appears as the first link and you can bypass the paywall.

Paywalls are nsfl. Thanks for the link.

The paywall link made it to the top of the front page, but somehow I'm down-voted...go figure.

As a Geezer Geek, this breaks my heart. When I was eight years old, my mom dragged me along to the Tandy Leather Company so my sister could buy some leather for some stupid project. In the corner of that huge store was a section with all kinds of electronic parts. I was fascinated. My mom bought me a crystal radio kit, some books and a CK722 germanium transistor, and later, an Ocean Hopper shortwave receiver (all of which I still have). For another generation, it will be the TRS-80 that was their first love, electronically speaking. Before they lost their way, Radio Shack started a lot of engineers down their career path and it is very sad to see this outcome.

Why couldn't they just stay a hobbyist store instead of schlepping cell phones? This stuff is cyclical and we're on the up-cycle now as they are going bankrupt. Instead of having their employees push plans they could have had them grow and share their knowledge of electronics. Sad, this place was near and dear to me for a bit.

A couple years ago I needed a capacitor right now and bopped down to the local RS. The components were located in a the back of the store, in a bin they obviously were not proud of having. I found my part and went to the register.

The clerk just waved me off and told me to take the capacitor and leave. He wasn't interested in ringing it up.

Radio Shack is full of rot, from the top to the bottom, and I am surprised they have lasted this long. They will only be missed when you need that twenty cent part now, for two bucks.

I don't know how much this is true recently, but RS used to be full of microoptimizing incentives which would encourage this kind of behavior, such as incentives tied to average sales size or percent of sales that included particular categories of items that the company wanted to move.

So, I can see why a small ticket sale that would bring down those kind of metrics for an associate would be against that associate's rational self interest, while letting someone walk out of the store with a capacitor -- even though it might make store metrics look worse after the next inventory, and certainly isn't better for the corporation -- would be considered less harmful.

Because what you're talking about is a much, much smaller business.

Adafruit, Sparkfun, et al, might like a word with you. Even though they are smaller businesses, they are thriving, there is nothing to say that they would be if RS had taken the same road.

Adafruit, Sparkfun, et al are also working out of cheap locations, Not malls and other high rent retail locations. I ordered from Adafruit once and it shipped from an apartment in Brooklyn.

Radio Shack is a retail store with many locations. There are not many people that have an immediate need for Rasberry pi components, they order online. So that model is dead. Radio Shack despite this does indeed still devote a small area of the store to things like this.

>There are not many people that have an immediate need for...

There are not many people that have an immediate need for any one particular item in a dry goods store on any particular day. The same is true for other stores and was always true for nearly every item RS carried.

I think the arguments ITT boil down to: did the internet kill RS, or did RS finally succumb to its own poor management.

> There are not many people that have an immediate need for any one particular item in a dry goods store on any particular day.

Small floor-plan dry goods stores aren't exactly a booming business, either.

> I think the arguments ITT boil down to: did the internet kill RS, or did RS finally succumb to its own poor management.

And the answer is "yes".

(In longer form, the internet was a key factor in a shift in the retail market for the classes of goods RS sells whose nature RS's management was slow to recognize, and reacted to poorly.)

I think we are pretty close to agreement now!

> Adafruit, Sparkfun, et al are also working out of cheap locations

Adafruit is in Manhattan.

The office appears to be, that doesn't necessarily mean the rest of their operations are.

It doesn't matter that they are successful though, they operate on a much, much smaller scale than Radioshack. The maker market isn't nearly large enough to sustain a company of that size... that is to say, if Radioshack shrank to the size of one of Adafruit, it be a colossal failure as a corporation.

The only chance they had to stay relevant was to challenge the Best Buy's of the world, but they failed to do that.

Right I posted a conjecture that RS might be able to grow the maker market.

>The maker market isn't nearly large enough to sustain a company of that size.

Well, neither are any of the other markets RS targeted, obviously. I wasn't proposing that RS go all-in on Raspberry pis.

>The only chance they had to stay relevant was to challenge the Best Buy's of the world, but they failed to do that.

Best Buy is not exactly killing it, but RS could have probably done something interesting there, I agree.

> The only chance they had to stay relevant was to challenge the Best Buy's of the world, but they failed to do that.

They tried -- back when what is now RadioShack was Tandy Corp. and Radio Shack was one of its units, it tried with the Incredible Universe stores -- but gave up because at the time their boutique Radio Shack stores were more profitable than their big-box Incredible Universe stores.

Of course, for widely-held, publicly traded corporations, there's a strong and often hard to resist incentive to do what maximizes results for the next earnings report rather than long-term resilience (if nothing else, because what will do the former is often much more clear than what will do the latter.)

Boy did I ever love Incredible Universe. Must've gone there 20 times as a kid, don't think we ever bought a single item.

i bought some kitchen gadget at one. An interesting store, purple inside with just lots of strange things. Not surprised they didn't last.

The long term resilience is key here -- but I think an education model helps. If you have knowledgeable employees who can help you, you turn a person who has no idea where to get started and won't into a consumer. We still go to brick and mortar places for help and advice, so provide it.

I think you are right, but I think RS has been focused on low-knowledge sales focused on training staff on narrow canned feature/function/benefit of particular products on the shelves and redirecting consumers in line with centrally-set incentives, with line management largely themselves developed through the same process, for so long -- decades -- that its been a long time since RadioShack could be practically turned around in that way, short of selling the name (presuming there is goodwill attached to be worth even that) to a different company with a completely different top-to-bottom culture.

I think a brick-and-mortar boutique electronics retail chain could work on that model, but I think it'd be easier at this point (or any time in the last decade or longer) to grow it from scratch than to turn RadioShack into it.

I would be curious to see what portion of Adafruit and Sparkfun customers are not located in Silicon Valley. Probably very low. A retail location might be sustainable there, but doubtful in exurbs of third-rate flyover states (where until recently, RadioShacks were still pretty easy to find.) Nerds are present but with very low density in large swaths of the country.

I think the proportion is high. I know that a couple dozen students in my rural southern town will need electronics supplies in the next few weeks as they do at the beginning of each semester.

Cell phones were huge for them. I worked at a radio shack store in the mid-90s when they started stocking car phones (big, bulky items) and very shortly after that hand-held phones. We used to sell them like hot cakes. As a high school student, I made pretty good money selling pagers, phones and computers. Compared to these items, resistors and batteries were no match.

Right, but that business is dead now. It belongs to mall-kiosks and strip-mall storefronts.

> Why couldn't they just stay a hobbyist store instead of schlepping cell phones?

Because even before selling cell-phones was a big deal, their main money maker for a decades was being a general consumer electronics store, with the hobbyist thing being secondary at best.

When I worked at a Radio Shack back in 1991 (ish?), I was told by the store manager that they sold things like TVs and Computers for the prestige factor, but that their real profit was highest on the electronic parts.

Good riddance. May whatever small void it leaves be filled by a diversity of mom-and-pop electronics stores. There's one such store in my area that seems to do well enough catering to the professional/hobby markets, with a couple locations, and has been around for decades. (Oddly it also has free popcorn.)

Agreed, in Santa Cruz there's Santa Cruz Electronics, which has tons of microprocessors/microcontrollers, tons of bare components, higher-level electronics, etc. It's what Radio Shack used to be before it turned into a consumer electronics reseller with outrageous markups and one tiny section tucked away in the back that has maybe 4 resistors and a couple of switches.

I haven't been in SC electonics for a few years, but last time I was there I was like a kid in a candy store.

However, it always sucks to hear people will be losing their jobs. I feel for the Radio Shack employees.

I'll have to visit that store next time I'm in SC.

I live in Australia, so when I was a kid it wasn't called Radioshack here, but rather Tandy Electronics (same company though, different name). You could by electronic components; resistors, LED's, hobbyist kits, breadboards and all kinds of electric items. Then they started moving out of the space into more consumer focused electronics, eventually you couldn't even buy a a packet of LED's like you once could. Eventually forgoing non-consumer focused electronic components altogether.

Such a shame that a company as iconic as Radioshack is filing for bankruptcy. Would things have been different if they stayed in the electronic component/hobbyist side of things? Who knows. They obviously got out of the components game for a reason. Here in Australia we have Jaycar Electronics which is exactly how I remember Tandy being when I was a kid. Electronic components, educational breadboard/electronic kits, weird gadgets, DIY kits and more. They seem to be doing fairly well and best of all: no televisions or computers in sight.

Lack of vision; blinkers on and plow forward. Of all the customer bases out there you would think that most Radio Shack customers would be far more favourable to ordering via the Internet and preferring delivery. I'm a bit surprised they didn't move more towards a RS / Farnell business with the occasional small shop front combined with a warehouse model (a la Argos).

This bankruptcy has been long anticipated. It's time.

There was a time when it was hard for hobbyists to buy parts. Even in Silicon Valley. I used to have a commercial account with Hamilton/Avnet just so I could order and pick up at will-call. The alternative was ordering from Allied Radio, with two week delivery and a 5% error rate. Now, anybody can order from Digi-Key, and get delivery tomorrow if you pay for express shipping. There's not even a minimum order.

If you're looking for a business model, consider a hobbyist front end to Digi-Key and Mouser. Digi-Key has about 40 options for a 1/10 watt 100 ohm leaded resistor. This overwhelms many hobbyists. (Do I need flame resistance?) Octopart does some of this, but a social component is needed. Something like Github for hardware, with design files, bills of materials, issue tracking, etc.

Sam from Octopart here. Our Common Parts Library is an effort to distill commonly used components for connected device applications, https://octopart.com/common-parts-library .

But the list doesn't have common prototyping components like radially leaded resistors (it's almost all SMT parts). I could imagine a "Common Parts Library for Prototyping". I'd love to hear feedback on something like this.

Also, check out our lightweight Bill of Materials Manager, https://octopart.com/bom-lookup/manage It has built in collaboration features - it can be collaboratively edited much like Google Docs.

> consider a hobbyist front end to Digi-Key and Mouser

Adafruit and SparkFun are that. SparkFun even explicitly mentions the Digikey part for boring stuff like capacitors. (https://www.sparkfun.com/products/8375)

The day before Christmas I found myself at a Radio Shack looking for jumper wires to go with an Arduino/breadboard kit I bought my daughter for Christmas. (A mix up with my wife's Amazon order left us suddenly without jumpers. Desperate times, desperate measures.) What a sad place. I ended up with some crappy jumpers that cost 2x more than the good ones we wanted from Amazon. The component section of RS is a joke. They used to be my go to in college (early 90s) when I needed components for a project. Now they are just trash. I left there Christmas Eve thankful I had some jumpers but they have now joined Walmart on my list of places I will only go if I am truly desperate and have exhausted all other options.

May I ask why is it that Walmart (for you) belongs in the same bin as Radioshack, in terms of the variety of offerings and availability?

Do you prefer Target or some other store for a greater selection or does your household mostly shop at Amazon?

I've heard Walmart was making a shift to smaller, approachable and more centrally located stores and was curious to see if this was the reason why.

I always disliked Walmart's selection. The prices are decent, better than I'll pay at most smaller stores, but they basically carry the same products at every location with no regional variation.

For example, in my college town there were two grocery stores: Walmart and Econofoods. Walmart carried it's typical products and was pretty boring. On the other hand, Econofoods had an impressive selection (more so because this was a small, 8,000 person town) of locally made products, alcohol, and ethnic food. It completely blew Walmart out of the water.

Walmart makes me feel depressed. Piles of awful, consumeristic shit everywhere. This, plus the fact that it is owned and run by truly terrible (in my opinion) people mean I go there only as an absolute last resort. I try to buy most things at non-chain or smaller chain stores (especially those that are known to treat their employees better) when I can.

I prefer not to shop at a place where the employees don't look like they can make ends meet. I'm not sure that is helping or hurting people on the whole, but it makes me feel better.

I wish places which underpaid their staff allowed you to pay a surcharge that would be distributed to the staff (plenty of supermarkets, petsmart, etc. will try to hit you up for small charitable donations -- I'd much rather add a few dollars to my bill to pay the employees better).

To put it bluntly... our Walmart is gross and is populated by gross people. There is a lot of truth to the "People of Walmart" meme in our Walmart.

I was building an electronics project last year and found it to be very helpful to go to my local RadioShack and just browse the components. Although they didn't have a huge selection and the employees knew nothing about any of it, any selection is greater than the selection anywhere else. For people who don't live in a big city, many don't have access to electronic components offline. You can get stuff on Amazon and SparkFun, with much more selection, but sometimes it's nicer to just browse in person, even if it's tucked away in the back corner.

I'm late to the game on this but Radio Shack has one thing the rest of us don't, and that's access to capital. I think they should sell the company to their employees and form a collective with borrowing power in order to fund some of the more compelling technologies that are sorely needed today like rooftop wifi meshnets or burner wimax cell phones that can be used to tether laptops for free. There are so many crowdfunded projects that would benefit from a technology co-op taking the place of institutional investors.

Then go back to their roots as a local store that keeps certain niche products in stock. For example, when I need parts from microchip.com, I should be able to have them sent to my local Radio Shack and pick them up the next day (if they aren't already there). So basically their business model would be to be a local subsidiary of amazon.com that specializes in up and coming technology. The information about who’s buying what and what they are building could be more valuable than sales.

I guess to summarize they would be a farmer’s market for technology, where people could buy shelf space and showcase their creations, which as far as I can tell doesn’t exist in most cities. We came close where I live during the Great Recession when big box stores were closing like crazy and the space was converted to bazaars. Unfortunately there were a lot more nicknacks than crafts because nobody had any money to buy anything. It would have been so awesome to be able to buy things like solar panels or hydroponics garden kits but usually we’d spend our money on a chair or whatever.

With the maker movement picking up, I almost feel that RadioShack could have done so much more in the hobbyist electronics market. They could have had Arduino kits and additions, 3D printers, drone parts etc, instead of just the go to store for cables.

I can almost see the RadioShack of the bygone days that hosted electronic clubs which could have had a comeback.

They tried to do this, at least over here (North SF bay). The local RS has (had?) Arduino and Propeller kits. At crazy prices, sure, but there have been a couple of "Dammit, it's Sunday and I need to finish this thing by Monday morning" saves for me.

Coincidentally I just yesterday bought an Arduino Yun, starter kit, and sensors. They were located near the 3D printer that was on sale. Maybe part of their problem is marketing.

I bought my first Arduino mega2560 at RS for $59.95.

Now i order them direct from dx.com at $15 for a clone that is exactly the same.

Last time I was in RadioShack was in the 90's in Washington DC, and I went there for a connector, and there were literally 20 people in line all buying minutes for cell phones, with only one person in the store. I thought this was some sort of hidden camera reality/joke tv show. I just put the item down and left.

I remember going to RS stores to buy a 99 cent part and the clerk having to write, in long hand, on a triplicate form, my name and address and the item, before entering the amount on a cash register. I refused to give my info, and he said he could not sell me the part without it, so I said: "OK, my name is John Doe at 123 Main Street". He looked at me quizically and then wrote it down on the form without a word.

For a long time I avoided Radio Shack stores because I did not want to go through this charade. Only when desperate ("I need this connector right now"). The desperate-user scenario is not one for business success, especially when selling 99 cent parts.

Radio Shack was infamous for collecting customer information. "No, we can't sell you without this information."

RS will be beloved by business-school types for how many different big mistakes it made.

I totally forgot about that! I used to give them 1600 Pennsylvania as my address. I was bike messenger at the time so I knew all the good addresses in DC and would give them all the big federal buildings.

This sounds almost identical to my last time in RadioShack, except instead of 20 people, there were two couples, each doing some contract change so onerous that I waited half an hour to buy the component in my hand -- and only got out then because one of the two clerks decided to put the cell phone contract bits on hold and let me buy my item.

How soon until Amazon buys the entire chain in order to get a distribution presence across the country?

As far as I know Radioshack doesn't own any of their stores so they're just leasing the retail space. Amazon would be better off opening new retail fronts.

Everyone is thinking about the consumer retail service of Radio Shack. But there's a lot of small contractors who basically use them as an outsourced inventory. Phone techs, alarm and AV installers, three out of five times I'm going to see Radio Shack connectors and resistors in their tool kit. I imagine the reason most stores keep those parts is not for amateurs but professionals who don't want to have to wait for UPS and deal with an impatient client.

That must be a business opportunity. If a Radio Shack store near you closes, stock up on F connectors, solder, and the most common resistor sizes then call around to contractors letting them know you can supply parts on demand.

I wonder if the proliferation of component types, even for hobbyists, would just be overwhelming for a brick and mortar store. As a kid, I shopped at Radio Shack all the time. I designed things around the parts that I knew they had, but it was still a pretty small selection.

When I got my first Digi-Key catalog (remember when it was about 1/4 inch thick?) I was just astounded by the variety of parts that I had no idea even existed, such as interesting IC's. Jameco and Mouser each had their own spin on what goodies I might like to have.

So I wonder if brick-and-mortar hobbyist electronics parts really still makes sense in this day and age.

I know a lot of people here will defend RS for selling phones/plans because "They had to" but it marked the LAST time I set foot in a RS when I went to buy some parts I needed and they tried to sell me a Voyager because "It was better than an iPhone" (Verizon's "iPhone" they released soon after the iPhone released). From that moment on I have just ordered what I wanted online.

That coupled with the fact that they stopped staffing with people who knew anything at all and instead staffed them with people who could sell more phones.

RadioShack could make a comeback if the Heathkit resurgence ever comes to fruition: http://www.heathkit.com/

They should partner with them!

Not going to happen. https://www.adafruit.com/blog/2014/12/22/update-heathkit-has...

It was mentioned by someone here or on Reddit previously that there is a lot of financial bets going on on whether RadioShack survives or not. In many cases in the past those who are betting that they survive have given RadioShack a lifeline in terms of loans and financing in order for them to survive so that the investors win their bets. I'm sure this is still going on still and it is no longer a question of fundamentals for RadioShack and rather a high stakes power game in the financial markets.

Nearly three years of losses and sales at their lowest levels in decades had forced the electronics chain to turn to debt investors for financial lifelines to stay in business. Objections from some of those same lenders prevented the company from closing hundreds of stores it felt it needed to shut down to stay afloat.

Sounds like they want to asset-strip the business and only lent money in order to have more leverage than they would get by purchasing equity on the open market.

This kinda sucks because, even though Radio Shack has always sold kinda cheap quality components, there were always there when you needed an adapter or plug or cable immediately.

It seems like there are a lot of good ideas here about what market radio shack can go after, from the 3D maker crowd, to boutique electronics, etc. I think it would take quite a visionary high up in the RS corporation to make that happen, but it would be cool.

It's a shame. RS doesn't really have much anymore in the way of electronics components, but they have some parts which cater to the arduino/maker community which helps when in a pinch. I really missed being able to get just about any electronic component when I moved from the southbay to SF. RS is now the only place where I could get the bare essentials in San Francisco.

If I were CEO, I'd become the Linux Store to compete with the Apple Stores and the Windows Stores -- there are some of those aren't there? There is a market for main-stream Linux and there's no retail presence.

Going further Radio-Shack has a computer brand, "TRS". Get some low-end white-box laptops, slap Ubuntu on them and hire a few one-eyed-man-in-the-land-of-the-blind Linux "gurus" and have at it. It's the modern analogue of HeathKit but with a more fundamentally useful demographic.

Their real-estate holdings are a match for computer shops - second and third tier retail space with small footprints. Apple has validated the idea that computer shops are viable...it's not just the Apple branding that makes them work, it's also the fact that if you're looking for a computer, you're not in a place with most of its floor space devoted to televisions.

The other big change is that smartphones and tablets have proved that operating systems are not that important to users. A lot of people are fine with an old version of Android rather than something more polished...never mind the Kindle's success...or all the variation between website widgets and app interfaces . People have been exposed to a lot of variation, and have learned adaptation techniques. A computer doesn't need to look like Windows or OSX to keep people from freaking out.

RadioShack has the experience in high-touch sales and the infrastructure to pull it off. All that's needed is the will.

You should send the RS board a proposal. Maybe they'll hire you.

Doubtful, undoubtedly.

I'm not cut out for schmoozing wealth.

Just for expressing the idea that there may be a space for computer stores.

The best part about this thread are all the recommendations for websites to replace RadioShack.

RadioShack sounds like an incredible opportunity for a blue chip software company wanting to get into hardware with a brick and mortar presence. Thousands of retail locations ready to go, all across the US has to be worth something to somebody.

Late to the party, but it may be interesting if Best Buy buys them and turns them all into their Best Buy Mobile stores.

RS already sells a ton of cell phones. Their locations are set up well for this, and the staff already trained to sell them.

I wanted to get a Beagle Bone Black over the holidays for some project. Didn't want to wait the 2 days for amazon, I wanted it that same day.

They wanted $100... So I got mine off of amazon for $54. Nuff said.

This is very sad. Radio Shack was my toy store as a kid, and bears some of the blame for making me who/what I am today.

Urh, anyone think Amazon might buy them? It would be nice for Amazon to have a physical store to demo Fire products.

If you live near Seattle, I recommend Vetco on the Eastside. It's what RadioShack should be.

What happens to the franchise stores when the parent company goes bankrupt?

Not sure in their case. But the Sbarro's around here all turned into generic pizza places, as far as I can tell everything tastes about the same.

Huh? Sbarro's still exists...

Yeah, I think they just closed a couple hundred locations during one of their bankruptcies.

Yea man! It's my favorite pizza place in NYC :)

If THAT's your favorite pizza in NYC, of all places, ... well, you need to sample the local wares more. Or you have no idea what "pizza" means.

Depends upon thheir agreement, and who winds up with the RS assets. Franchisees might have to replace the signage.

It's about time - the RadioShack I grew up with died years ago.

It would be sad to see my go-to electronics DIY-spot go away.

I still miss Heathkit

Radio Shack not so much in the age of the internet.

The clearance sales will be fun.

time to grab an arduino for like $10 just before the local one closes its doors lmfao

farewell old friend

Apologies about the link to a restricted site. I didn't notice it since I landed on the article via a search.

Out of curiosity, since several comments here complained about the paywall ("paywalls are nsfl"), and an equal number or more on HN run adblockers and/or openly dislike ads in general (the whole "you are the product" meme), how do you think news sites should monetize?

Seems like newspapers still add value in our lives (I know the WSJ does for me), but if they don't find a way to make money, either through paid subscriptions or advertisements, they'll be out of business just as fast as RadioShack.

I think there is a distinction to be made here.

Paywalls are fine. If you feel that the Wall Street Journal is worth your time and money then feel free to subscribe to it. But paywalls are a double edged sword. If the source requires people to subscribe to read it, then the vast majority of internet users wont have a chance to read it, and learns to avoid the site.

When you share a link in public forum and the link requires a subscription to read it, that means most readers wont have a chance to enjoy the content and they feel frustrated.

You can usually find an article about the same topic on a public site. The manner the topic is covered, the depth of the article, the quality of the coverage might be different but it will give the general public an idea about what it is all about.

As far as ads and ad blockers. Tivo and tivo like devices are pretty common now that you can skip over tv commercials. I think its the same with web based ad blockers. The truth is that the majority of people who use these things would not have had a positive response to the ad in the first place.

What does happen, both on tv and on the web, is that product placements in the content itself becomes more and more common.

Remember TimesSelect? [1]

Search Engine Land has an excellent write-up on the debate so far.[2]

There are no clear answers but I for one just hate the notion of a single individual businessman - American or otherwise - owning a sizable interest in America's preeminent newspaper.[3] It isn't healthy to the voice of the publication, in the long run.

[1] TimesSelect

http://www.nytimes.com/marketing/ts/ http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/lettertoreaders.html

[2] The Leaky New York Times Paywall & How “Google Limits” Led To “Search Engine Limits”

http://searchengineland.com/leaky-new-york-times-paywall-goo...

[3] Carlos Slim Becomes Largest Individual New York Times Shareholder

http://www.wsj.com/articles/carlos-slim-exercises-new-york-t...

> Out of curiosity, since several comments here complained about the paywall ("paywalls are nsfl"), and an equal number or more on HN run adblockers and/or openly dislike ads in general (the whole "you are the product" meme), how do you think newspapers should monetize?

I adblock aggressively, and I don't think it's my capitalist duty to watch ads for products in order to create wants for products I don't need.[1] I'm very bothered by the idea of being "nice" to a site by watching ads. I don't want to help a site by watching ads; that's supposed to help a third party by creating a need in me to buy something, not the website I actually care about. I much prefer cut-and-dry paywalls or donation buttons.

Thus, I'm fine with newspapers having paywalls. If that's what sells, let them paywall everything. It's their prerogative. However, there are also plenty of unpaywalled sources. At the moment, most news can be obtained from the web without paying, and I doubt that this will change. I don't have a solution for the news industry, but guilting me into watching ads will never work.

Paywalls for academic journals are an entirely different problem, since in many cases the journal "editors" are in fact rather parisitic and contribute nothing but prestige, while the actual work is done by others and is unpaid. Those paywalls are terrible. But you made something and you don't want me to see it until I pay? That's fine.

[1] And I almost never "need" anything. "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." If I need something, I'll know it. I don't need ads to tell me what to need. I therefore find the entire premise behind advertising pernicious. Only when I want to buy something, I'll look at ads, so until I actually have a need or want to buy something, don't shove ads down my throat or guilt me into watching them.

It is interesting to interpret not using adblock as capitalist duty. I see it more as a way to respect the terms of the content producer. "But the page is bloated and unusable with ads". Then refuse the contract. Use another service.

Inventing your own terms about the cost of something produced by someone else is never ok.

"guilting me into watching ads will never work". It is great that you accept your own behavior. That doesn't make it right.

> It is interesting to interpret not using adblock as capitalist duty. I see it more as a way to respect the terms of the content producer.

The author has no lordship over my computer or my mailbox. I can toss out junk mail. I can even more easily program my computer to toss out ads. Programmability is a very natural feature of a computer, so why not use it? My home, my computer, my rules.

If you make it more difficult for me to remove ads, then yes, I will eventually stop getting anything from you at all. I'm fine with this arms race. If you want to make your ads so obnoxious as to make them very difficult to ignore, then I'm fine with ignoring all of you.

I will never be fine with having consumerism forcibly shoved down my throat. As long as I can program my computer to ignore ads, we can enjoy an uneasy armistice. If you give me a donation or subscription button for your website or service, we can both be much happier.

Be sure that this arm race is happening. How do you find the overall quality of web media today? Are you satisfied?

As a business, once you realize that 1% of your users are watching ads, what are you going to do? You can either go for a paywall, integrate sponsored content provided as articles, or aim at the less tech savy internet users with click-bait articles.

So what is your solution? You seem satisfied with the current trend of poor quality articles and businesses slowly going bankrupt while this "uneasy armistice" lasts. Why would you be at war with those websites anyway?

> As a business, once you realize that 1% of your users are watching ads, what are you going to do?

A paywall seems like a fine solution.

Manipulating people into wanting things they don't need is not.

This reasoning falls apart pretty quickly when you take into account that you are adblocking content you specifically requested. Effectively, your justifications are the same as those who pirate media, "Give me your content, but I don't feel I should have to pay for it." Pretending there is a difference is a bit dishonest, in my opinion.

I'm fine with paying for things. I mentioned donation buttons and paywalls. I'm not fine with making my computer do things I do not want it to do or forcing me to watch things I do not need to see.

Are you claiming that someone or something is forcing you to visit certain websites?

Don't be disingenous. I'm saying that when I merely visit certain websites, they try to manipulate my computer to do or display things certain things I may not agree to. They try to make my computer run certain code that doesn't suit well with me or make my browser show images or text I don't want to see.

I consider unsolicited advertising pernicious and inherently morally wrong. Manipulating people into buying things they don't need creates an awful consumerist society of people who spend their lives acquiring junk that doesn't make them happy. I have never asked to be advertised to most things that are being addressed to me. I don't think this means I should ostracise myself from society when I can just adblock.

More superficially, if I decided to change font faces or sizes on some website, would you say I've breached a certain social contract of how the website author decided I should see that website? Am I robbing them of their artistic integrity by not honouring their font choices? If I think advertising is pernicious, and in fact react negatively and with anger to most advertising, am I doing them a horrible disfavour by changing the page to not show those ads?

I don't think I am. Once the bytes arrive on my computer, I should have the right to display those bytes in whatever form suits me. I hate ads and savage consumerism so much, that it's really in everyone's best interest if I don't see them.

I understand this thinking, but everyone who believes they should be able to get their content for free without ads will soon find themselves out of sites to visit due to them not being able to sustain themselves.

I'm not sure why people think they should be able to get no-ad sites for free, I get it, but you should understand the repercussions of thinking this way.

Probably because that's the way the Internet worked before the Big Media companies infested it and started the process of turning into Cable TV 2.0.

Not really.

I'd love to know how a high traffic site is supposed to sustain itself with millions of hits every month without advertising if the site itself is free and the users would otherwise scoff at paying? If it were an easy fix it would be happening already.

It's offensive for you to place your opinion in the context of "right and wrong", specifically that your opinion is "right".

If content owners want to block adblocker: They can! They absolutely can use javascript to detect ad-blockers and prevent the majority of all of them from visiting the site unless the adblock is disabled.

Sites like Hulu.com use anti-adblock to ensure that their terms are met and that users view advertisements or are barred from content.

Instead of making a moral argument against the legal and acceptable use of browser extensions, you should be examining the business decisions that lead to intentionally and strategically choosing to NOT BLOCK users who use adblock.

"Inventing your own terms about the cost of something produced by someone else is never ok."

I totally agree, which is why I question your invented ethical cost regarding browser extensions and advertisements.

Their terms are clear, and if they want to block certain users, they are free to do that. You don't need to invent some silly ethical argument where none needs to exist. If adblocking was against the law (like, say, shoplifting) then your argument would have merit. But it's not.

Your argument is similar, in my view, to saying "it's unethical to go to Best Buy to window shop and later purchase on a website. You should respect the terms and businesses intentions of a brick and mortar store and pay extra since you walked in the door".

I agree with about when you say that businesses should not ignore the fact that adblock is wildy used when making decisions.

Imagine now that if a working drm solution existed for films, it would be ok to download the unprotected ones for free? Surely a technical solution is way of making a business profitable, but not an argument to justify a bad behavior.

And yes, even if moral is irrelevant to businesses, it is still something worth considering as individuals.

"Imagine now that if a working drm solution existed for films, it would be ok to download the unprotected ones for free? Surely a technical solution is way of making a business profitable, but not an argument to justify a bad behavior."

Apples and Oranges.

If the movie studio offered an officially hosted version of the movie with advertisements for free online, and I watched without advertisements on their official site (similar to a news organization posting their news online for free, with ads), then yes it's ok. They can (and do! See: Crackle) block that particular behavior from working very simply.

But, to go pirate a movie from a third source? That's not only wrong it's actually illegal.

I don't go to "thenewsbay" and download illegal copies of the New York Times, so it's unfair to make a comparison to pirated movies.

I find it disheartening that the common talk of ads is so distanced from the original social justification for ads: to educate and inform consumers. Primarily, to help ensure that the economy engages in the proper degree of competition.

Unfortunately, ads are so full of misinformation and propaganda that there is no hope to be informed by them, so they do not help with the original goal: the very thing that makes them acceptable practice. An advertisement should inform and educate -- something that increasingly requires communication _without bias_ (how radical!)

Since I use ddg, I can put this in my addr/search bar:

!gn site:wsj.com "RadioShack Prepares Bankruptcy Filing"

which brings me to this:

http://news.google.com/news/search?tbm=nws&q=site%3Awsj.com%...

Perhaps for sites that allow this (NYT and WSJ come to mind), it should become part of HN culture to just post links in the second form (the google news link).

Otherwise, I'm sure many people here are capable of creating a bookmarklet that does the above directly from an HN page. I just do the manual op that I described above, it's not that onerous or that often. But I'm rarely reading from a phone either.

This bookmarklet seems to work in the few cases I tested: javascript:var as = document.getElementsByTagName("a");searchurl=as[12].protocol +"//"+ as[12].hostname + as[12].pathname;location.href='http://google.com/search?q='+searchurl

If you click it from a HN comments page, it will Google the story's url. For NYT and WSJ, clicking on the story from the Google results should get you in without the paywall. I have only tested this in Firefox. If anyone has improvements to the bookmarklet, please post it.

Hey, not bad. I just tried it for a bbc.com story and it showed up on search.

Maybe this javascript thing will catch on.

I don't disagree with paywalls generally, but I don't think paywalled content should be (intentionally) linked as the main subject on HN or similar unless that is the only good source of information about the matter in hand. It stops us masses actually reading what you have posted for us to read.

If all the non-paywalled sources are lacking detail, then I'd suggest using one of them for the main link and add a "more detail <here> behind the paywall" comment immediately below.

Obnoxious advertising (pop-ups, auto playing audio, ...) is universally bad though and should not be linked to at all if avoidable. I'd prefer a paywalled source to one that uses obnoxious ads/trackers/other.

> I don't think paywalled content should be (intentionally) linked as the main subject on HN or similar unless that is the only good source of information about the matter in hand.

I think a fair expectation is that if you're going to post a link to a paywalled site, you should add a brief summary of the article as a comment. (Kind of like a companion to tl;dr, only in this case, it's te;dr, for "too expensive; didn't read.")

Usually a good paywalled article will at least present an abstract, which should cover the need for a summary.

If it is an absolute paywall (pay or read nothing, no abstract/summary for free) then yes the poster should provide a summary so others can decide if they want to gain access to the rest or not.

I think paywalls are reasonable good way (from consumer point of view) to bring in money, although I realize that it probably would mean scaling down for many major publications. The LWN model might be the ideal balance point; recent items are subscriber-only, older stuff is free. That should work even better for WSJ style publication where I'd assume most people are more interested in breaking news rather than week old stuff.

I can understand where the anti-paywall sentiment stems from. We have been conditioned for over an decade to get free news from web. Meanwhile piratism has become mainstream and anti-copyright movement has grown, both which have changed peoples ways of thinking about value of information etc. Some might also think paywalls to be exploitative bait-and-switch tactic, which admittedly might be true in some cases.

Of course there is stark difference between supporting paywalls as a concept, and supporting posting links to paywalled content to places like HN (or reddit or /. etc), because you are kinda doing some "viral" marketing for the publication and dividing the community to those who subscribe and those who do not. That will inherently limit the communitys ability to discuss the content.

Complete aside, but I just did a google search for "site:news.ycombinator.com lwn.net" and filtered to "this past week" to make a comment similar to yours, and Google found your comment, which is 24 minutes old right now. I'm pretty jaded with internet search, but frankly I'm astounded (Although I might have just gotten lucky with the spider).

> how do you think newspapers should monetize?

Idea I had is to flip the model. Newspapers pay readers, who for payment agree to see ads tailored to their interests. Users are given short quizzes after article to prove they actually read. Fail, and they don't get paid.

I can't imagine how that could fail!

write an article about it. and please don't call online news vendors the papers

WSJ and NYT are the papers even if you're reading them online, because they literally are newspapers in real life.

People who use adblock are just entitled. They are manipulating the tragedy of the commons and then absolving themselves of any responsibility.

They'll defend their right to use adblock militantly and then go pirate a game using the same defense. It's a personal moral defense rather than a logical justification.

Or, you know, we just don't want to have to deal with bad ads cluttering up our content, or ads that spy on and track us, or ads that start playing sound for no apparent reason, or ads that break our browsers.

Yeah, no, on second thought--it's probably that we're actually pirates. That's a much more obvious answer.

This isn't a rebuttal against the tragedy of the commons argument. Commercial fisherman "just don't want to have to deal with" catching less fish, but overfishing is still a problem.

If I put a bowl of M&Ms out on my front lawn, and then complain that nobody else refills it from time to time, is that the tragedy of the commons, or me just being a fool?

I would gladly fill your bowl with m and ms.

pretty terrible analogy.

there's no point at which you putting M&Ms on your lawn can be self-sustaining. Both professional journalism and fish populations CAN be self-sustaining (from the perspective of individual consumers).

Also, even if your analogy did make sense, the end result would be no more M&Ms (aka no more professional journalism). That's the outcome we're trying to avoid.

>They are manipulating the tragedy of the commons and then absolving themselves of any responsibility.

The tragedy of the commons is entirely about that lack of responsibility. This is why we try to use social structure in lieu of 'free for all' decision-making.

A. If you think vehemently defending adblock is 'militant', grow up.

B. Using adblock has nothing to do with pirating games.

Make better ads. People might want to see them. Don't be so repetitive, abrasive, deceptive, obnoxious, etc. (Google made quite a lot of money by offering text-only ads, if you'll remember.)

You can't make a completely useless and shitty product and demand that people eat it, either. Talk about 'entitled'.

I'm not even so opposed to ads. I resent and avoid being followed and targeted mercilessly and stupidly[1].

[1] - Seeing and increase in ads for lawn mowers after purchasing a lawn mower, as if I needed another one.

IMHO ad blocking is good security practice. There have and continue to be plenty of instances of malware being served up via ad networks. "Malvertising" even has its own Wikipedia page.

Even CEO Can't Figure Out How RadioShack Still In Business

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

Can we not link to stories behind the WSJ paywall?

Agreed, but for this one you get free access if you are referred from Google:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

Doesn't get me in. (UK)

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