Hacker News Reader

Comment by danpat | Hacker News Reader

Radio Shack definitely missed the niche that Sparkfun/Adafruit and others have filled.

However, I suspect that niche is nowhere near big enough to support Radio Shack's size. All those retail outlets can't be cheap to run. They needed a business/market that was easy to transition to and would support their existing size. They chose wrong, but I don't think ditching the hobby market was necessarily a wrong move in their position. Once the improved experience of ordering hobby electronics online became more widely available, "storefront supply of hobby electronics" was not a business model that could ever support a massive chain of retail stores.

View on HN

>However, I suspect that niche is nowhere near big enough to support Radio Shack's size.

This is my thinking as well. Retail is brutal. Each shelf needs to being in x amount of money as space is limited. You have to worry about staffing, taxes, inventory, etc and knowing the full time that amazon or monocable beats you everytime on your high-margin items must be scary.

All these geek friendly narratives keep getting built (oh if they did this or if they did that) but I think the reality is that retail only fits certain business models. Radio shack not longer fits in one of those models since the rise of the big box store and the web. We're talking, what, 5 to 10 stores per market? That's a lot of infrastructure to support and big bills to pay every month. Even during its heydey it was a dumping ground of low quality stuff, namely its Realistic house brand, and its own computer brand which never really competed with its peers like the Apple //e or c or VIC20/C64. I think there's more than little brand nostalgia applied to Radio Shack. Its always been a poor business and its once formidable component supply wasn't ever enough to keep it afloat.

Even in the glory days of Radio Shack, the real money came from CB radios and “Realistic” brand stereo equipment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realistic_(brand)

A Radio Shack-manager friend once told me that his whole business was supported by WWII-era grandparents who refused to buy “jap” stereos. Their business didn’t just die; their customer base literally did too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com