Did the market of the electronics hobbyist become too small for them? I knew one guy who managed a Radio Shack for a while and heard of another. The home office seemed to not want to sell electronic parts.
Nah, the sales are probably all over.
Almost certainly. They didn’t carry enough stuff for the serious hobbyist/enthusiast and probably not 1 in 100 customers even knew what a resistor was. I was central in hobby electronics in the 1980s and it was clear that the day of the soldering-iron hobbyist was well towards sunset. Thirty years later? Surprised they even have that tiny part section any more.
RS, being weird, was among the first to try hard (obnoxiously hard, obviously by leaning on the employees) to collect tracking information. I don’t think I was ever in a store without encountering someone who got pissed at the insistence on taking their address and info, and that’s over a period of years.
Now, of course, we all just wear our tracking tags around our collars and love it. :smack:
Perhaps you could safely store the one from this season until winter has passed.
Y’know, rather than using it as a target down on the pistol range…
–G!
I mean, yeah, they’re cheap and it’s really cool when the parts go flying, but…
Yeah! Did you SEE that line for the model 6 last week?
I didn’t know they came with a collar, though.
–G!
I’m sure I mentioned it in the other thread too, but I went in for a phone jack. This was years ago when it was still heard of to have a landline. So one of these
He had no idea what I was talking about. So I went to KMart and found one for a few bucks. I was tempted to go back and show him.
battery cards no longer good.
RadioShack files for Ch. 11 bankruptcy protection
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/radioshack-files-ch-11-bankruptcy-222534944.html
A fellow on NPR this afternoon was blaming it on the failure of the TRS-80.
I think it’s what happens when you go from selling electronic parts to cell phone plans.
:dubious:
11 straight quarters of losing money and years of mismanagement. They have been terrible at their core business for almost 2 decades now. The business of selling parts to home hobbyists.
Too smart to work at Radio Shack? Isn’t that like being too fast for the Special Olympics?
What other companies have this kind of policy? I don’t know much about drills or plywood. Will Home Depot hire me as an ignoramus sales drone? Will NAPA Auto Parts hire someone who horribly flunked the ASE mechanic’s exam? Can I turn my profound lack of knowledge about propane and propane accessories into perhaps not a glorious but a stable career?
RadioShack Officially Files for Bankruptcy , this was on the news tonight and I bet the store in my city will be closing .
I confess with great shame that I was told I was “Too pretty” to work at the local Waffle House. They had some measuring device that determined my makeup was applied at an insufficient thickness, my ponytail wasn’t crooked enough, and my shoes “Were liable to remind patrons they are eating at the Waffle House”.
Also got too many tattoos for the bank, not enough for Hot Topic 
If I understand this Bloomberg article right, some 1700 stores will remain open, with a Sprint store within a store, so RadioShack is not going away entirely (yet).
I’m baffled how a company that was so successful, especially with the TRS-80 back in the late 70s, could fall so far. But then again, Montgomery Ward is gone, and Sears has gone under the surface for the last time.
Businessweek’s cover story this week is about how Radio Shack got to this point. It’s an interesting history of the company.
BTW, I heard that Amazon might be interested in buying some of the Radio Shack stores, so that it would have a retail presence.
I went to Radio Shack a couple of months ago to buy a 12 V CT transformer.
The kid asked me what a transformer was.
Sears is going bankrupt because they fucked with me over lawnmower repair. I wanted the pull start repaired.'They sent it from Little Rock, Arkansas to Texas, and I was called by an outsourced woman who, bless her heart, spoke English very badly, and insisted on $500 of repairs, including a muffler.
I was a bit of an electronics hobbyist from the mid 1990’s until about 2003 or so. Although I didn’t, many of my fellow geeks called Radio Shack “Rat Shack” due to a perception that it was a money-grubbing company selling overpriced stuff to people who didn’t know what it was really worth. In 1998 or thereabouts, the “real” source of resistors, capacitors, breadboards, and commodity IC chips was mail-order catalogs. While online sales did happen, the Internet, for most people, was still somewhat slow (e.g. it might take you 2-3 minutes to load a simple website) and the Internet as a whole was still a bit Spartan in terms of retail space. There were, however, fewer cat videos.
Great article, thanks. I remember going into RadioShack stores in the early 2000s for a resistor, or a cable, or an obscure battery, and having a salesperson yap at me endlessly about my need for a cell phone. I eventually gave up on RadioShack, and ordered over the Internet.
I’m guessing the Amazon thing is just a rumor; I can’t find any confirmation.
Radio Shack: You’ve got questions, we’ve got cell phones!