Their model is completely nonworkable in the era of Best Buy (last bigtronic box standing) and the internet. But I’m not surprised to see them throwing megabux at a last-ditch attempt to hold on to the niche*.
- Pronounced “nitch”
The hobby died when Tandy (which made leather-tooling tools for hobbyists) decided to go into electronics and bought:
Allied Electronics of Chicago
Lafayette Electronics (which made cheap “HiFi” components - which became the Radio shack “Realistic” brand
Radio Shack (a non-player)
Allied was the big loss - i had a catalog of a couple of hundred pages - any component you wanted - a resistor, capacitor, tube, transistor, chassis - they would sell you a single item. Want a SPST switch? AC or DC? Rotary, slide, toggle, push button? amp rating? Voltage? a couple of pages of just switches - Radio Shack will offer 2 or 3 choices.
I guess I hold a grudge longer than most. My granddad, dad and I used to get a lot of our stuff from Walter Asche Radio in St. Louis, a smaller competitor to Allied Radio in Chicago. I think my dad worked there in college days. You could walk up to the counter with a list of parts (coils, capacitors, connectors) and get the clerk to pull them from the bins for you. Some of the clerks could actually read the resistor codes without a cheat sheet. 
Then Radio Shack bought them out. For a while, both product lines existed in the same store. But soon, gone were the bins behind the counter. Now it was all self-service, and if you needed 2 resistors for a project, you had to buy a blister pack of a dozen assorted values. All the clerks knew was how to punch the registers. Hey, that wasn’t so bad – modern merchandising and all – but the quality, durable products had been replaced with cheap shit that quickly fell apart. I threw away many cables I made when the plastic plugs started to crack.
Sometimes all you want is cheap shit, so I go there accordingly.
I was with Radio Shack as a trainee and a manager for 4 years from 81-85. Those years were the glory days of the rise of the TRS-80 (later Tandy) branded personal computers in the early 80’s and the slow fade as the TRS computers got swamped by the IBM PC and Apple.
Radio Shack actually had a decent selection of in house stuff re antennas, stereos and radios and answering machines etc but as the 80’s progressed the aforesaid bread and butter merchandise quality got crappier and crappier as the buyers focused on profit ratios vs quality. RS coasted a long way on prior good will in that era but eventually as it was obvious we were selling shit compared to the competition and the brand reputation seriously declined in the mid to late 80’s.
On the plus side it was often exciting to be the portal for new stuff like bag cell phones, the Model 100 portable computers, CD players when they first came out. It was like living in the future.
Back in the day we were paid on commission and the mangers on profit and there were some store managers making up to a half million dollars a year. There were a lot of talented people around when the compensation was decent. Some time after I left they went to an hourly pay model and this flushed lot of the higher powered sales and managerial talent out the door.
If you want to build stuff, it’s easier than it ever was. There are workshops set up in major cities with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of tools you can use for a nominal fee. You can order virtually any specialized component you can imagine from Digikey and other supplies for a moderate fee. The stuff has gotten a lot easier to work with as well.
I was working on a robot just last year. I found that I could get the parts easily from various online shops, and that the programming language has been streamlined to make it extremely easy to get basic stuff working. (I’m talking about programming Arduinos in C)
Need an IMU more accurate than what they put into missiles in the 80s? No problem, just $30 or so from Sparkfun. Having trouble with the coding? You can find more open source projects that show how to do things than you can ever imagine.
Heck, even the high end, specialized knowledge - graduate courses from MIT on how to do control systems, machine vision, and other advanced topics is technically a mouseclick away and free.
eBay won by network advantage. It’s not really that applicable to retail. Does Google shopping actually make any money? I think it’s mostly just propped up by Google’s ad revenue.
Amazon won through a combination of excellent foresight and razor thin margins that no one could beat. It turns out that existing stores and warehouses are a liability when you want to win in online sales. Amazon had two advantages there: 1, they don’t have to pay rent on existing expensive retail locations. 2, as a startup, they didn’t have to actually make money for years. If Sears or another existing retailer had tried to lower prices to compete with Amazon, their stockholders would have revolted.
Building a warehouse and delivery system is arguably easier than building the software around it. We already know how to build warehouses and delivery trucks. What Amazon did, making a software interface that an average person could use (and would trust) and building the underlying logistics software that let them be so damned efficient, was very difficult.
I disagree that it’s a small change, even ignoring the existing structural problems that Amazon exploited. I worked at Sears for a few months during the summer of 2000. Their ordering system was archaic and incredibly hard to use. New employees spent a week in training and about 80% of that time was spent learning the basics of a monochrome text-based absurdity with all kinds of cruft built in. Want to come in and make a $20 layaway payment on the riding lawnmower that comes out in a month, but you want it shipped to a different store than the one you’re standing in? Yeah, we can do that, but it’ll take three dozen screens and ten minutes and god help you if I hit the wrong key when I’m eight screens deep.
Software is hard to do correctly, and software user interfaces are arguably the core competency of future retail.
If only there were some kind of service or forum that one could go online and browse catalogues of components, compare prices, or exchange advice with other tinkerers. Some kind of…marketplace or bulletin board, or somewhere you could order parts using some kind of electronic credit system, look up plans and schematics, and get ideas for new projects. Hmmm…surely someone could make a going concern of this, at least as a side job. Maybe delivering orders via mail, or balloons, or a ginormous national network of pnuematic tubes. It seems like a few bright and industrious college students could come up with something to fill this void…
Stranger
I’m surprised they are only closing 1,100 stores, with the remaining 2,900 stores, that’s almost double the number of Chipotle’s out there. I frequent Chipotle about 50 times more often than I do a Radio Shack.
Would you believe drones?
Between Microcenter and the internet I only end up going there about twice a year, and always leave disappointed.
I find that hard to believe.
Would you about a powered mini-dirigible system?
No.
How about a geek on a bicycle?
Sorry about that, chief.
As one who spent over 25 years developing software:
It is NOT difficult if you understand:
Where you are
Where you came from
Where you might want to go next
Add that to: Users are idiots; chimp-proof anything that a human can modify
Corollary: Know which chimp can do what and deny them the ability to do anything else.
Old motto: If builders built structures the way programmers build systems, the first termite would destroy civilization.
It didn’t used to be that bad - until everyone decided that lots of little machines were preferable to one big one, and that nobody would EVER try to deliberately break something.
It seems huge systems were built in which all programs executed at “god” level.
I got a hint at a Unix class I took, wherein the 4-byte security code was discussed only in reference to the LAST 3 bytes. What’s the high0order byte? “That’s where you switch user ids in the middle of execution”.
I would have NEVER guessed that Unix was written by grad students!
A good friend of mine usually goes with “You’ve got questions? We’ve got batteries!”
When I was at a massively large cell phone company a decade ago, we had an engineering stock room that would make the old Radio Shack jealous.
Now that I’m at a small startup, I take what I can get. We desperately needed some really thin wire one day…ended up buying a three pack of various wires at RS just to get the one we needed. sigh
[QUOTE=iamthewalrus(:3=]
I worked at Sears for a few months during the summer of 2000. Their ordering system was archaic and incredibly hard to use. New employees spent a week in training and about 80% of that time was spent learning the basics of a monochrome text-based absurdity with all kinds of cruft built in.
[/QUOTE]
I think they’ve since upgraded and run their system on an AS/400, so there’s at least some color to the text.
I was at a Radio Shack just last week. I needed a 3 volt power supply to replace a pair of AA batteries in a component, and a pair of alligator clips. They had them - they were expensive as Hell compared to buying on-line - but I got them and had the component working. The power supply was $12.95 and a bag of clips was $4.95.
So I could have gone to Digikey and bought the same things for $4.50 and $1.95, but I would have had to have waited. Or checked eBay and gotten them in for a fraction of the price from China. Which tells me that there is enough margin to devote 12 square feet of floor space to the cabinets holding the small parts.
I am lucky that I am in Kansas City most of the time, and have a world class electronics distributor that still has a city desk. I can drop in there MF 7 AM to 5 PM and buy pretty much anything.
I agree with Antibob. I don’t know how much my opinion is worth as
#1
I’m only 39
#2
I don’t know remotely as much about electronics as I’d like.
But, I remember frequent trips to Radio Shack with my dad when I was much younger. It seemed to me that there was everything that an experimenter would need. Here were the parts for every project (be it legal or otherwise) you could ever want to build. Dad did all kinds of things with the stereo, the televisions, the VCRs (I still have the “color enhancer” he bought at Radio Shack to defeat Macrovision) and all kinds of other stuff. I viewed Radio Shack as the magician’s toyshop. As I grew up, that changed. It wasn’t that I became disillusioned. It was that the store kept reducing the section of cool experimenter stuff. Many years ago, I declared “The Radio Shack I knew is dead.”
RE Experimenters On The Decline
Maybe it’s who I hang out with, but I’ve seen just the opposite. A Dungeons & Dragons acquaintance was constantly talking about what he’d made and coded (He had a lamp in house that could be turned on and off by strangers on the internet*). AndrewL is constantly turning out wonders of robotics and 3 D printing. Another friend is experimenting with vacuum chambers at home. Personally, I’m always striving to learn more about electronics and new ways to use light emitting diodes.
Missed the edit window and forgot to add
- Yes, Howard Wallowitz does the same thing on an episode of BBT. I immediately thought of Dan when I saw that episode.
I will break out into a “happy dance” when that shit-hole of a company goes under for good finally.
Fuckers.
You sure know how to make a geek drool, doncha?
Nothing backwards there. Everything’s up to date in Kansas City.
Heh…yeah, I can go there and buy wire cut to length. I’ve been shopping there since I was a teen and they know my name. It’s like a geek Cheers, I sit on a stool and they take my order.
I’ve fear that some chucklehead will decide that they should close the city counter, concentrate on the mail order and move to the burbs to save 1% on their taxes. But I think most of the employees are related and one of the women who works the counter is the owner, thus they benefit from government bidding process as a “woman-owned business”. So that helps keep them there, as well as the fact that there are still plenty of manufacturing and industrial businesses in a 5 mile radius of their location, like Hallmark Cards.
People like to know they can get parts to repair something that day. Maybe Bezos will kill them with same day delivery, but I hope not.