Who wants to be Radio Shack, now that they aren't interested in doing it any more?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Why in the world is Radio Shack concentrating on cell phones and low cost common size batteries, and neglecting parts and supplies and other technical and hobbyist products?

Since they helped drive Lafayette out of the business, there’s practically nobody serving the parts business from walk-in stores in most towns. Radio Shack was the only place I could go in this county, or the ones around it, to buy an LED or a potentiometer, or for that matter your typical kinda weird battery.

I tried several Radio Shacks to buy some N cells (they look about like a half-length AAA cell and go in my calculator). None of them had one, but they all tried to talk me into buying a cell phone and getting some kind of card to carry to eventually earn a discount on AA, AAA, C, D and 9V batteries. They say these are their core businesses now.

Why buy a cell phone or ordinary batteries at Radio Shack? Their reputation, well earned, has for decades been for selling junky, flashy stuff for too high a price, asking too many prying questions if you’re just buying a battery for cash, and also having obscure things nobody else stocks. Every discount store around has loads of the ordinary batteries. And there are as many cell phone stores as there are cell phone services, plus the big electronics discounters.

Now the dinky county seat has 9 places competing for cell phone sales instead of 8, and I’m waiting for Amazon to send me stupid N cells, because the only 3 N cells in the county are dead and sitting on my desk.

They did this before, when they moved away from the leather business, but it’s hard to see why it’s a good idea this time. At some point, cell phones and cell services are going to get separated by law, like land line phones and services did, and we will buy cell phones at Target and the grocery store, next to the batteries.

And they only had one tiny rack of batteries, with card-packaged batteries on pegs! I could have fit the lot into a medium grocery bag!

2

I’m in a big city. I’m lucky enough that I can go out of the way to one of a number of specialized professional electronics parts retailers. But yes, I agree with your rant. Radio Shack was the only easy-to-get-to and common place to get basic electronic supplies. The ones in Canada were sold and rebranded as “The Source”, but they still sell electronics parts and weird batteries. For now. They have just been bought by Bell (!) so Og alone knows what’s going to happen to them.

3

Someone will be along soon to say “what about Fry’s?” Not all large cities have Fry’s stores, though, and some large cities tend to be at the end of the line when it comes to expansion of national chain stores.

4

I used to work for a large Australian retailer very much like Radio Shack was back in the days when Radio Shack sold batteries and cordless phones and toys and so forth.

The short answer to your question is “There’s not enough people interested in Hobbyist Electronics to justify retail stores devoted to it”.

The staff don’t know anything about restoring a Radiation King-brand radio, nor what sort of resistors or diodes a Russian shortwave radio from the late '80s might need, nor what sort of belt drive a particular LP turntable might need. The staff are getting paid the same as their counterparts in any other retail store, so anything they know about electronics (beyond what the computer system says) is a bonus brought about by their interest in the subject.

Online stores are the place for fiddly componentry- there’s no money in it for bigger stores. When you consider that a resistor costs 5c, you have to sell a lot of them to make it worthwhile. And the people that wa’ted resistors, diodes, piezo buzzers, switches, and so on were almost always more trouble than the sale was worth, IME.

Not sure why Radio Shack in the US has stopped selling batteries, though- I thought that was their thing? I visited a Radio Shack in San Francisco looking for some rechargeable AA batteries last year and gave up because the guys in the store didn’t really know anything about them (ie, which ones would last the longest in a digital camera). I ended up getting the batteries from the Virgin MegaStore, of all places!

You might find this Onion article amusing- I certainly did. :slight_smile:

5

It won’t be Radio Shack anymore; they’re changing the name… to The Shack.

6

Likewise, I went into the The Source store in the Eaton Centre to ask about an antenna for over-the-air HDTV. They had no idea what I was talking about. The guys at Future Shop just up the road, the ones who tried to sell me a $145 Monster Cable to connect a BD player to a display without HDMI, did know what I was talking about.

How the mighty have fallen.

7

daHubby and I were talking about this very same subject last night. He said he used to love to go in RS and just browse through the neato-keen stuff that hobbyists and so forth would enjoy.

RS used to be the only place that sold TV antenna rotator kits that worked for more than a month. I don’t know how many of them my dad bought from them over the years, but they worked better than the ones the “specialty TV shops” sold.

8

Does Radio Shack even publish a catalog anymore?

9

I’d rather have teeth pulled out without anaesthetic than shop for anything at Frys. Those places are huge, unfriendly and the training for the store staff seems to be limited to these topics:

[ul]
[li]Creative Ways To Disappear When Customers Need Help.[/li][li]How To Learn About The Merchandise By Eavesdropping On Customers Discussing It Among Themselves While They Hope Someone Will Come Around To Help Them.[/li][li]How To Say “Let Me Ask A Co-Worker” Then Clock Out For Lunch.[/li][/ul]

Too bad, really, when there was just the one in Fremont and one in Palo Alto, they were pretty good. More than once, nearly 20 years ago, I’d hop on Caltrain in San Francisco, ride down to Palo Alto, walk a couple of really long blocks to the store and happily spend a few hours poking around.

Ever since they bought out Radio Shack’s “Incredible Universe” spinoff about 15 years ago, things went downhill in a hurry. Hmm. Wonder if there’s a connection there?

10

I used to work at Radio Shack - back in the late 70’s and early 80’s, when we sold crappy stereos but had all the parts in the world and some of the first home computers.

Our store manager was an advanced Ham radio operator. We had a pot of coffee on all the time, and customers were welcome to come in and chat. I remember many days writing schematics for bridge rectifiers and whatnot for various customers designing their own projects. Our store sponsored the local homebrew computer club, and the manager and I were both charter members.

I miss those days. Back then, Radio Shacks were often staffed by hobbyists, engineering students, or people just plain interested in and knowledgeable about electronics. It didn’t pay all that much, but in a lot of ways it was one of the best jobs I ever had, and I miss those times.

Unfortunately, the model doesn’t work any more. Electronics have rapidly moved past the point where hobbyists can build anything that isn’t available cheaper and better commercially. Ham radio is a shadow of its former self. Heathkit has gone out of business. The Internet has removed the need for local clubs to act as information sharing outlets. The business Radio Shack was in is dying along just like telephone operators did.

I guess they have to find a niche they can survive in, or just shutter their doors.

11

It’s pretty rare that I need a part faster that tomorrow.

So, I generally shop at Digikey or Mouser online, and have them deliver right to my door. There’s no way that RS is going to be able to compete with that model.

Still, the Radio Shacks near me (there are 3 in a 3-mile radius) all have lots of batteries and a standard assortment of parts.

Oh, and for batteries, there’s Batteries Plus, which stocks many more battery types than RS.

12

Well, I think the amalgam of replies here does a pretty thorough job of capturing what RS was (especially Sam Stone’s), what it is, what it will be, and why, and why not. The only thing missing is the wonder and mystery of it all, and content at the Onion link nails that one, too.

I guess I like the idea of changing the name to The Shack. It reminds me of places that sell Tee shirts, and fixes the problem of RS employees not knowing what a “radio shack” actually is (was?), which used to be good for chuckles when I first started noticing this change.

I know about a dozen walk-in places, off the top of my head, where I can buy carved wooden ducks, and several places that sell block-and-tackle pulleys, and a couple places that sell bismuth metal. Yet parts for the entire field of electronics, and now even N batteries, have to be ordered. I dunno - it just seems wrong somehow…

13

Beo, I missed your post while writing mine, but - again - you’re right on the topic, and we should meet some time. My friends and I used to have Boy’s Night Out, and propeller-heads that we were, we’d always wind up at Radio Shack. We need a venue.

I go - or went - to RS when I was working something out and could finish it if only I had a reed switch, a solar cell, a breadboard the size of a postage stamp, and the like. It was nice to run out and get a breath of fresh air, or add a few extra minutes to lunch and feel productive while I was doing it. There’s no way I’m going to be able to continue that model. I live inside a corporate structure, and maybe Digikey and FedEx can get the reed switch to me in 23 hours, but we have an Excellence Model where I work. To ordering something , I have to start a game of Whisper Down the Alley, and eventually somebody I don’t know in a plant located in a state I’m not sure of calls the vendor, and if none of the links were on vacation I can count on the order being placed within a day or two or a week or perhaps two weeks. I think part of the reason this model worked historically is that there were better local sources and the entire category of nonlocal sources always implied a week or two of waiting anyway. I’m stuck in a niche of evolutionary pressure, I guess.

14

Electronic parts are unique.
There are many hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) of different parts.
Unlike something like Auto parts or Appliance parts, where there is also large numbers of parts (but not as many as electronics), there is very little demand for DIY electronic parts.

So, you are left with a dilemma. You can either stock a few hundred of the most common parts, and hope that you get enough walk-in traffic to support your business, or you can be a gargantuan stocking distributor, selling everything, and do all your business by mail.

15

My boyfriend and his business partner are somehow making a living selling weird old cameras, and Radio Shack can’t sell me a damned battery? It’s embarrassing. Maybe they should make some space in the camera store and stock some resistors and LEDs and such.

16

A few months ago, I needed a particular audio cable to connect my new HDTV to a PC. I checked at Radio Shack, but the right cable would have been $6-7, which seemed overpriced. So I went home and ordered it from Monoprice.com for about a buck plus a couple of dollars for postage. And the entire time I was in Radio Shack, no one offered to help me.

I’m old enough that the TV set we had when I was a child was the sort with actual vacuum tubes. When it stopped working, we would pull all of the tubes (after carefully labeling the locations of them) and go to Radio Shack where we used the tube tester to identify the dead one. We could then replace it for a few dollars and get the TV working again.

And for a long time after that, battery sales were a big deal for them, and they had this club that if you joined it, you could get a free battery each month.

Now it seems the big focus is on cell phone sales. I do realize that’s the big market today, but it’s not like there aren’t dozens of other places to buy a cell phone. Every strip mall around here has three or four cell phone stores.

It’s sad, too, because the store has a long history during the twentieth century; first in the ham radio business, then the hifi business and then the early personal computer business, with the TRS-80 computers.

17

At work I had I had a hard time getting batteries for a certain brand electronics gauges, because there were hardly any out there to buy. The last time I needed them the manufacturer of the gauge had already resorted to contacting a battery manufacturer in China and having them make batteries for them, so the customers could buy batteries from the manufacturer to support their product.

18

I have a feeling that if Radio Shack still kept their old model, despite the decline of electronic hobbyists, and CB and amateur radio, they’d still be chugging along. Cheap cables, speaker and other kinds of wire, transistor and clock radios, cheap phones, general computer parts and accessories, oddball batteries, – they could have served a similar role that a neighborhood hardware store serves today with Home Depot right around the corner. Computer tweakers and modders picked up where the electronics geeks of previous generations left off, but not every city has a Fry’s or Micro Center catering to them. There’s also a revival in electronics geekery; witness Make magazine.

19

If you’re reading this thread, you’ll probably like reading the Radio Shack Catalog Archive:

20

Oh man, thanks for that! I used to love those catalogs. When the new one came out, it was like getting the Sears Wish Book. When I was a young teenager, I used to thumb through those catalogs until they were dog-eared. Looking at them now, every page of those old 70’s catalogs is triggering memories galore.