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.
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.)
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.
> 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.)
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.
> 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.
