After it was too late by that author's reckoning, the parent of Radio Shack tried another venture, a "big box" store called The Incredible Universe. When that failed and they wrote it off, it wiped out the entire profit of Radio Shack thousands of stores for that financial year.

I still think of it when I'm trying to understand the machinations of large companies.

And I, too hope that the folks I worked with at RS in the 20C found better jobs, especially the poor store managers.

It's big, but some of the California Fry's stores I've been to were much bigger, and much better stocked.

But Fry's knows how to keep costs low. I'm pretty sure that for at least a decade after the takeover there were a number of trucks with Incredible Universe markings parked outside. No point in repainting!

Reading these, I don't feel like I missed out on too much.

I also remember being able to walk into a Radio Shack in my local mall and stroll over to the electronics section and pick out just the right resistor that I needed to complete my circuit project at home. I think I was 12 at the time.

That experience lead me to understand that a common failure mode was that the radio receiver circuit had some tuning caps on it that would get jostled about, causing the car to cease responding. Not sure why they went with trim caps other than it meant everything else could be wider tolerances if they just tuned it once fully assembled. It did lead to a lot of fallout though.

He cashed in all his parental good will and actually got them to order it for him. Then it came and the 1:20 scale car basically went about 60/20 mph and we did the math... I felt bad for him, but hey... they didn't exactly lie!

http://www.theonion.com/articles/even-ceo-cant-figure-out-ho...

That's from 2007, making the continued existence today even more perplexing.

You are talking about something that sounds in a way like "Weird Stuff Warehouse" loved that store.

http://www.weirdstuff.com/cgi-bin/category.cgi?category=sunn...

http://www.weirdstuff.com/cgi-bin/category.cgi?category=weir...

Radio Shack has thousands of stores and they are located in shopping centers and malls. They have to get a certain amount per square foot to pay the rent. And mall shoppers (as only one example) aren't really fitting in to this particular market.

Radioshack.com 10 foot HDMI cable $29.99 "marked down" to $15.99 plus sales tax

amazon.com 3 meter HDMI cable $7.49 plus... plus nothing, free prime shipping

So I can order from amazon right now and have it in two days, or wait days/hours until I have time to visit a legacy brick and mortar and pay twice as much.

So without even looking at the radioshack price, amazon will ship me a rasp pi B bare board for $37.69 prime. I'm guessing $75 at the shack. I go to radioshack.com $119.20 Reg Price $129.99 Pi starter kit. Well, thats got a case, a protoboard, some parts, a flash card, figure maybe $20 worth of stuff.

I'm just not seeing it.

I assure you that in the 80s comparing Radio Shack to a place like Jameco mail order the prices were vaguely competitive by the time you added shipping and handling and there were minimum orders. RS wasn't a bad deal decades ago, believe it or not! I'm not sure how/why they lost that. From personal experience/gossip and OPs article its not labor costs seeing as paychecks apparently haven't changed much nominally since the 80s. Maybe building rents have exploded? Bad corporate financial deals?

I think this is plausible as a contributing (but by no means primary) factor.

I owned a few stores in malls in the 2k's and before the Great Recession hit, the publicly traded mall management companies didn't realize how overbuilt and over-priced their spaces were and charged accordingly. Absolutely insane per-square foot rents + gross profit % of rent. It was absolutely impossible to make a profit based on their 10 year lease rates that didn't account for changing consumer behaviors.

I suspect that most Radio Shack locations saw a drop in foot traffic and combined with a mismatch in demographics with their offerings caused a shift to high-pressure sales tactics and less technical products. So sad. I loved the TRS-80.

These factors as well as others, probably pushed RS corporate to local optima that ensured their final demise.

As a concrete example, the local indoor upscale mall used to sell absolutely everything in the early 80s, like a giant department store. So you can take a teenage son to the mall in the 80s and drop him at Radio Shack to look at computers, video games, scanners, ham radio, stereos, speakers, car audio... but the mall has since converted into 95% womens designer fashion and 5% food court, so the Radio Shack has to switch to selling cell phones to women if they don't want to close. As one of the few non-womens fashion stores left in the mall, in the long run, closing is inevitable, and as a stand alone store they can't compete with the giant stand alone Best Buy store, so they're kind of doomed.

I had a model 3 and several coco models including a complete OS-9 system. I never owned anything as nicely designed or as technologically advanced as OS-9 until linux in the early 90s. There's a rather optimistic assumption that technology only moves forwards, but the msdos era wasn't that long ago and provides a counterexample.

He had two stores that due to mall expansion and re configurations just died. He operated both at a serious loss for several years -- at one point the mall was fining him for not making money! It killed his cash flow, but He couldn't pull out without losing his good leases. Ultimately, he was saved when a big box store bought out his lease.

Sadly though, the electronic parts + kits section of RadioShack reminds me of the PC games section of most game stores now. It's so underwhelmingly small that, if you can manage to even find it, chances are it won't have what you came for anyway.

Top of the list should be 'Replace all middle and senior executives and managers.'

It's fascinating to watch how organisations slide into extreme failure and dysfunction. And the loss is total - not is only is RS a terrible place to shop, it's a terrible place to work.

Achieving an outcome with absolutely no upside takes real talent.

But this kind of simmering hostility to everyone below a certain managerial seems endemic in corporations that grow beyond a certain size. It's not guaranteed to happen, but it seems to happen more often than it should.

It's a fascinating phenomenon. It's surprising it hasn't been researched more fully.

Even with other options nearby, Radio Shack is still the closest place to me that sells such parts -- and the only one that's open past 5pm, or on Sundays.

I wonder if there's a way for them to double-down on the geek side of their inventory. They're at least picking up a lot of "maker" inventory: Arduino and related kits, etc.

They just need to raise demand. They could, for instance, provide and promote free curriculum plans for schools or clubs that just happened to need the kinds of components you can't buy anywhere locally but Radio Shack.

After reading that article, however, I'm inclined to think that their problems are not so much from a market that changed out from under them, but rather are internal and self-inflicted. If so, then they completely deserve their current situation.

They've actually tried somewhat to stock parts that maker movement-types might want: I was in an RS recently, and I was shocked at how much Arduino stuff they had on the shelves, for instance. When you look at their website, though, it's dominated by Beats headphones and iPhone 6s - they've somehow managed to survive for at least 20 years or so without really picking the market they are trying to serve.

The hobbyist stuff at CompUSA (video cards, disk drives, tools, etc) were just a way to get you in to potentially buy a PC.

What's the issue? These stores survived by selling big ticket items like computers and cellular phones at high margin, and upselling people into accessories, service plans, etc. A TRS-80 sold for the equivalent of $1500 2014 dollars, sold at a 25% margin and generated sales of all sorts of other crap. A bag cell phone in 1990 was $1200, and carriers paid substantial commissions for the contract life.

By 2004 when this dude worked there, the PC market tanked for retailers as PC prices imploded and margins shrunk. So they were stuck with selling toys and other stuff. The Nextel craze and smartphone revolution propped them up a bit, but the market for phones is about as saturated as you can get -- my local supermarket sells crappy droids for $40.

The highest quality people don't generally decide they want to join a sinking ship (let's say a store manager or district manager). The quality people are either happy elsewhere already (and not looking) or they take advantage (as a general rule) of the better opportunities either because they can or because they are smart enough to recognize those opportunities and pursue them. At my first company there were people that didn't even show up for interviews. Maybe they saw the facility and didn't like the way that it looked.

Separately, presumably if the author had a better opportunity he wouldn't have suffered for "three and a half years as a RadioShack employee".

[1] But even then if your basic model is not viable you aren't going to stand a big chance of making it. This isn't something like "People still buy cars Chrysler just can't make a car that people want".

Two other bay area places that have changed a lot are Frys and the now closed Quement Electronics. Fry's still has a few components, but nothing like the 80s and 90s.

RIP.

There was a period a few years back wherein everything I bought there had some defect. Literally 5-6 things in a row: cordless phone, monitor that could not be adjusted, LCD TV with a single dead pixel out of the box, DVD player wherein the drawer would close by itself within 2 seconds of opening, etc. The crazy thing is that it all worked. It just didn't work properly.

I kept thinking I was having bad luck, so kept trying before finally declaring I wouldn't buy from there. I sincerely think they are/were selling used and/or known defective stuff as new. To make matters worse, the return process of our local store makes customers feel like criminals when just trying to get a refund for their crappy crap.

One of my fondest memories when I was out in SV in the early 90's was Frys and Weird Stuff Warehouse.

I think I first heard of WSW and Fry's in a book written by Guy Kawasaki [1] who was a big deal in the late 80's.

Recently I had the opportunity to visit Fry's in 2006 when I was in town for an conference. Then later in Las Vegas last year. Fry's of 2006 was no match for what I remembered in the early 90's. But nowhere near as bad as the Las Vegas store which to me was like a large Best Buy.

Another great store that changed was Micro Center. They had all sorts of little parts, tools, gadgets and a great book section. When I recently visited that it had also changed greatly and there was a slop of merchandise as well as empty shelves and little to call a book section (which was a total mess). That was the store in Pennsylvania. They still had the logos of companies in the store as part of the lighted signage such as "Okidata" , "Creative Labs", and so on. They never even took that info down even though from memory most of the companies from their golden era didn't even really exist anymore at least selling to that market (Oki exists but not selling the same type products that would be sold at a retail store like Micro Center). (I had an Okidata 2410 in the 80's loved the sound of that printing things high speed..)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Kawasaki

They still do. Most radioshacks I've visited carry arduino kits and ICs, electronic parts, LEDs, resistors, capacitors, etc.

Radio Shack always did that -- especially on batteries. High margins on things like batteries is what provided the cash flow that paid for the floor space devoted to more unique things that sold less but brought in customers who bought the batteries.

The problem Radio Shack has now is that with the internet and big-box electronics stores, RS's dinky stores aren't particularly great places for hobbyists (and wouldn't be even if they devoted more of their floor space to them), and they don't have a competitive selection of mass market goods either, so the basic format doesn't work.

And the lady at the will-call desk is a wonderful human being for being patient with me taking forever to fill an order.

Back in the late 80s / early 90s, a friend and I used to go out there about once a year (usually after the Borland/CompuServe picnic, of all things) to shop around for upgrades. Compared to what was available in the back country of the San Joaquin valley, it was pretty cool.

More memories, made obsolete by change :-)

The article had a lot of weird stuff about not understanding why people wouldn't leave a crappy job. Well, perhaps 90% of the time the only crappy part was the paycheck, you just hung out and screwed around and occasionally sold stuff to people. So I'd take the city bus to his store after school and we'd play video/computer games for HOURS during the slow times. We had kind of a game on betting when the last customer would come in, maybe 6pm or so most days, then we had the store to ourselves till 10 or so, literally a kid in a toy store. It honestly was a lot of fun almost all the time, just not much pay. You could make a ton of money at lunch and after work rush, and saturdays, like $40/hr (which in the 80s was a lot), but you had to hang out all night long at minimum wage if you wanted the plum hours. Sales were extremely uneven over time. I still don't understand why they ever opened before noon or were open after 6pm or so.

I can prove he worked there... in the mid 80s each shipment contained a hopeless VCR tape of sales blather not for public consumption. Sell Sell Sell!

Governmental organizations, in contrast, have no incentives to adapt, and no "recycling" mechanism. Failure is emphatically not an option. Worse, bureaucracy inevitably takes on the primary mission of preserving itself.

I suspect it's hard for people who are under 30, maybe even 40, to believe how different RS once was from the sad sack we have today. I don't think they were ever really cool -- that air you now get from their '70s and '80s catalog of old white dudes trying to be hip is an air you got from those catalogs even when they were brand new, trust me -- but they had big selections of really interesting stuff, most of which was exclusive to them, and frequently had salespeople who were genuinely enthusiastic about electronics and computers. And the importance of the TRS-80 in the early computer scene seems to be vastly underestimated today, I suspect in part because of that perpetual lack of cool. You might dimly remember "Trash-80" jokes, but you may not remember that for a few years it was the best-selling computer in the world. And unless you followed the company, you almost certainly don't remember that they had separate "Tandy Computer Center" stores, or that they sold an IBM PCjr "clone" called the Tandy 1000 that fixed all of the PCjr's problems and became so popular that big name games had exclusive Tandy 1000 features, or that they actually shipped a frikkin' Xenix workstation (The TRS-80 Model 16) years before most people had any idea what that was or why they should care.

And, really, that last one sums up Radio Shack in a nutshell, especially with computers: always either a few years ahead of their time, or a few years behind it. As someone who grew up with the TRS-80 Model I and later Model 4 (and who did a lot of strange mad science stuff with it up even into the early '90s), I'll miss RS -- but the RS that I have fond memories of has been gone a long time.

But it might be accurate to say that Radio Shack was lost for want of space; to wit, Radio Shack's store format was optimized for electronics-as-niche-hobby, and Radio Shack really never adapted to electronics-as-mass-market, and their small format stores suffered with too little focus for the small space (both in terms of mass consumer vs. hobbyist offerings, and lack of focus within the growing part of the store assigned to mass consumer offerings). RS's corporate parent did eventually get the idea that larger stores were needed, but it got into the game late with Incredible Universe, and eventually got out again.

From at least the early-1990s, Radio Shack has had about as much focus as Fry's -- with stores that often have a footprint significantly smaller than a typical Fry's checkout area.

It was a store with a very large number of SKUs that they could only sustain through very high profit margins. Sure that works great when it's Sunday and you need that resistor now, but the vast majority of times people would just order online.

True, but I'm not sure those are mutually exclusive. I'd bet that the primary reason RadioShack never became a major online parts and electronics retailer is because of fear that it'd start cannibalizing their retail stores. Which it would have -- but either you cannibalize your own business or someone else does it for you. And I could certainly imagine an alternate history where they kept their own "captive brands" like Realistic and Optimus and competed reasonably well with the likes of Jabra, Jambox, Vizio and friends; I'm sure they had what they felt were sound business reasons for dumping that strategy, but it removed virtually all possibilities that buyers would go to RS for something only they sold, and I can't help but think that had significant value. (I suspect it's only the Sears captive brands that have let it hang on as long as it has, given how woefully it's been managed its last decade.)

The Sears you are thinking about before the last decade was already dieing -- the current "Sears" is the result of KMart buying Sears in 2004 (during a brief profitably period shortly after KMart's own bankruptcy, and the combined entity -- which was called Sears Holdings Corporation -- went south pretty quickly.)

I don't think Sears captive brands are keeping it alive for the last decade, I think the temporary reset it got at the acquisition by KMart has been keeping it alive.

There are a few of them near me and one is still a pretty decent "need it right now" electronic components place (with very limited selection) but the other two just sell cellphones and HDMI cables and basically nothing else.

Fortunately, my local Frys has a very good components selection.

Ebay and Amazon, both launched in 1995, spelled doom for a store that relied on selling you the overpriced battery, CD-R, or $90 HDMI cable.

Ah, I don't miss being required to hock those at customers. We used to have to watch training videos (in Macromedia Flash!) about how Monster's special braiding technology transferred the bits with more fidelity.

But they really weren't the worst offender. "Overpriced" doesn't begin to describe the markup on their batteries. When I worked there -- and i'm sure it's even more now -- it was several hundred percent. It was absurd to the point that I went to my boss for clarification thinking that maybe the POS drops decimal places or something.

The really sad thing is, I don't think they were consciously lying. Monster's BS wouldn't work anywhere near as well as it does if they didn't believe it themselves.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100

http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/catalog_directory.html

My first "real" job after high school was at the local RadioShack, which was owned by one of the most amazing people in my early adult life. I had shopped there for years as a teenager, as it was the only place I could find electronic parts without cracking the Mouser catalog. This was the mid 90s, and there was nearly no e-commerce yet. One day I was in there looking at the HTX-202, RadioShack's entry into 2-meter amateur radio handsets, as I had just been licensed as a Technician Class ham for the first time. Richard said "Hey, Morgan, you still looking for a job?" "Sure, but what happened to Dennis?" I replied. He said "Well, Dennis kinda died." Poor Dennis, his only employee and an elderly gentleman, had suffered an aneurysm and just like that, he was gone. Thus, thanks to the untimely death of a nice old man, I got my first and only RadioShack sales associate position.

Working there was an absolute blast; the pay sucked and the only commission to be had was on Primestar satellite sales, but Richard was like that cool uncle everyone has. I learned a lot about how to run a small business from him, and there was never a day that we didn't have fun. Christmas season could be hectic, but in a good way, with parents who were delighted to see that we carried batteries for all the toys their kids were getting (along with some nifty toys like R/C cars, too).

Even after getting a better full time job a couple of years later, I stayed on part time with Richard for over a year, until he could hire someone to replace me. I still drop in when I'm in my hometown to say hi, and we still keep in touch via email. It really saddens me to know that he'll likely have to drop the RadioShack name one day soon, but I know his store will continue operating for the foreseeable future. His kind of salesmanship stands far above what you get at the corporate stores.

Could he turn his shop into a for-profit hackerspace that has inventory for projects?

There are some annoying liability (ie expensive) issues with letting minors operate soldering irons on the premises or while using solder that has lead in it. But mostly people just don't go out. So when you look at the probability of having enough "customers" you find you need a really large population base while maintaining a very small foot print. New York comes to mind or London. Hard to scale it to more spread out places.

We're now so scared of liability that kids don't get a chance to learn how to work with their hands.

The franchise stores were doing so well that corporate got the 'brilliant' idea that they would open up corporate stores within spitting distance of every successful franchise. They figured they could steal the customers away and make more money -- and thanks to friendly financing terms for much better locations, they did. The only franchise stores that survived are basically the ones that have always been run by fantastic people and could outmaneuver the company that should have been their partner all along.

Ever since then, my beloved RatShack has been peddling useless crap. Still, there's nowhere else I can go when I need circuit parts in a hurry.

RadioShack is an absolutely parasitic entity and deserved to be dead and gone decades ago.

A RS that sells electronics and guns. I would patronize that store so _hard_.

Just to make this clear, I want to not know what you'd do with it ;-)

Guns and drones are, however, an interesting subject. Wildly impractical, now, due to safety, payload, and usability issues.

Why is this sad when his store will outlive Radioshack? I'm sure he or one of his customers can come up with a better name anyways.

I say it's sad because it's a strategic location for a RadioShack; the one in the nearest town over dropped the franchise long ago and the owner merged his business with a local hardware store. So for about 30 miles all around, it's the only RadioShack. I have a feeling though, his regular clientele will keep him afloat, and he's smart enough to know how to keep new people coming in.

We have good evidence to suggest that the RS business model is indeed viable in 2014: it's Maplin https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8328621 (followup https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8329953 ).

Mind you, Maplin has turned into a UK Tandy and is really no longer a sane source for electronic components. Wouldn't be surprised if they eventually went down the pan or shrunk their stores base.

Remember the orange/green/white collectable discount vouchers you'd receive with your orders.

And I remember lots of those old early games had special settings for Tandy computers, special video modes, 3-channel sound, that sort of thing (I don't remember the specifics), I wondered what all the fuss was about since you couldn't buy a Tandy video card or audio card and they weren't really "industry standards" in the way a VGA graphics card or a Sound Blaster was.

I went back and visited my local RS to see one of their Tandy machines and came away singularly unimpressed. I realized then that there was really nothing Radio Shack could offer me that I couldn't get easier and cheaper from dozens of other, larger, stores with better selection.

Years later I stopped by to pick up a cuecat and I've never visited a RS outside of that.

I never understood why they didn't start aggregating their small stores into bigger stores. Heck, even Office Depot offered me more selection than my local Radio Shacks. With the coming and going of Circuit City, the entrance of Frys, Best Buy, CompUSA, etc. I never understood why they stuck by the old '70s electronic store tucked away in the corner of a strip mall next to the Laundrymat model.

Unfortunately, they started doing so 4-5 years too late. I was shocked in 2007-2008 when I needed a couple of resistors to finish a project, the local Nerd Palace (Electronic Parts Outlet, in Houston) was closed on a Sunday, and the local Radio Shack actually had that pull-out file of components with what I needed.

The bond holders stopped them from closing unprofitable stores...

The more they focus on building/diy electronics the better, this is higher margin (and lower price) than simply retailing finished electronics, although they'll need to do some of that too I suppose.

I was in high school and lived with my folks. I had almost no expenses. It didn't occur to me until much later what a bummer it all was.

- You get paid commission, something like 1% per sale. Commission was pointless because almost everyone already knew what they needed (AA batteries or a headphone adapter...).

- If your commission didn't add up to minimum wage, you got minimum wage. Since it was nearly impossible to sell $800/hr at Radio Shack, everyone made minimum wage.

- There was a computer screen in the back room that showed a leaderboard of on-duty employees, and how much each sold for the day in real-time. So even though everyone was making minimum wage, the employees were pitted against each other. This made every employee your enemy.

- If somehow you made a commission for the day, when the item was ever returned, they dock the commission from your next paycheck. So you ended up making less than minimum wage.

We were told stories of a sales associate that managed to make about $80k a year. He managed this by getting customers a RS credit card and loading up the customers' shopping cart full of stuff. He did this by telling the customers that their monthly/weekly credit card payments would be $X, which might seem like a reasonable amount to the unwise. The funny thing is, that guy's store wasn't even profitable (well, from what I heard).

Anyways, by the time I worked there, RS had transitioned to being a cell phone retailer more than anything else. I think I've been in a store maybe twice in the last 11 years.

I had no notion of selling on commission, but I did understand selling someone a bill of goods rather than what they wanted or needed. And that's about when I stopped shopping there.

Probably the Windows XP syndrome of never ever ever never investing into your infrastructure, but stretched over fourty years.

You don't even need much. Get a laser cutter, a 3D printer, a drill press, free WiFi, some tables, and a stack of arduinos and you'll be doing awesome.

Then build an instructables-esque community website for people to show off their projects.

I'll even consult with you guys on this if you make a big enough donation to the hackerspace I help run in Phoenix.

Sadly, the opportunity costs of running a 2nd rate phone store must suck. Sounds like it would be more profitable to use the space to make and sell hamburgers or pizza.

Hmmm. Maybe they could have a "maker" workshop that also sells pizza and beer???

1. Sell off all the inventory.

2. Rebrand, lose the name Radioshack because it's the definition of cheaply made, overpriced garbage. It's embarrassing to even be seen in that store.

3. Go with a minimalistic store layout, like the Apple store (http://cdn.iphonehacks.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/AppleR...), because existing stores look like a warehouse or junkyard. Carry higher end phones, tablets, ebook readers, laptops, headphones and accessories.

4. Sell some cables and things cheap to get people in the door. Instead of selling an HDMI cable for $100, sell it for $5, so people walk in the door, and don't feel like they're being screwed over. Then, when they're inside, they can play around with the expensive hardware, and potentially walk away with a tablet.

I never made a big purchase at RS, but I always appreciated that I could pop in for electronic sundries as needed over the years. My opinion of them started to go south about a decade ago when they began insisting that they needed to know my zipcode every time I bought something. That was very fishy and heralded their sad decline, I think.

RS has been obsolete for years and I really don't know how they've managed to stay in business this long, but I'll miss the name when it's gone.

When I worked for RS just out of high school (1990) that was already corporate policy.

C: "Why do you need to know my phone number?"

M: "I don't, ma'am, but the computer needs it."

C: "Oh, OK... 313..."

M: "It also wants your address."

C: "What? Why?"

M: {skip}{skip}{skip} "That'll be $5.68 ma'am."

The days of high-touch service are over.

Well done.

<not_sarcastic/>

The employees almost never knew anything technical, and were often suspicious of nerdy kids like me lingering in the parts section. I remember one time I was building a circuit and needed a .22uF cap. I asked if a .22pF was the same (I was like 10 or 11). Instead of saying "I don't know" the sales guy just kind of stared at the package and then shrugged and said "Yep". My circuit did not work.

I hear people floating the idea of RS reinventing itself as more of a hacker-friendly place, but from an investor's perspective you'd be switching from a giant consumer market to a much smaller niche market. Personally, I think that's a great idea, but I'm not sure you could ever convince investors of that.

I remember being excited to get my free 9v every month. Simpler times.

Focusing in those areas seems exactly what RadioShack could and should have been doing.

I also remember my friend in high school picking up a special ordered US Robotics 14.4k HST modem with his Tandy PC in 1989 from Radio Shack - I was still on 1200 baud on my c64 and I lost a $5 bet that such a fast modem even existed. I was utterly blown away by the speed.

At some point management decided it needed to be another CarPhoneWarehouse or RandomTechJunkShack

1) Charles Tandy died in late 1978. This was right as the computer revolution was taking off and his loss of vision was bad news.

2) IIRC, one of the corporate officers embezzled an enormous amount of cash in the 1980's right as the IBM PC clone business was taking off. This stalled the company at a point when it needed to be pivoting. Unfortunately, I have only my memory to rely on as I can't seem to pull this out of any of the web search engines.

I've had better experiences, I even got a microSD from them the other day(after being tipped by a friend that they were cost competitive on this one item). But it has never been warm fuzzies.

Besides, there are at least 6 RS stores in this city, the furthest I know of being maybe 10 miles away, so I'm guessing there must be a few RS stores out there that I don't know about. Since they've all stayed in business for many years, they have to be selling some items or services or something.

I can report at least two positive aspects of my RS visit. The guy at the cash register actually knew something about the gear I was interesting in and could answer technical questions. Second, prices were low and the quality of items seemed pretty good.

So yeah, there are reasons I would hate to see them go...

Edit: but I think RadioShack's future is in the hands of Wall Street types who only see it as an interesting financial instrument where they can cheat some fools out of money before totally liquidating.

I think the author nailed it on the head with this statement:

>Working at RadioShack was sort of the worst of two worlds: there was the poverty-level income of a blue-collar retail job, coupled with the expectations, political nonsense, and corporate soullessness of the white-collar environment.

There was a non-stop, life or death pressure from management to sell -- especially phones and "add ons." I was once written up for selling a phone without attaching 3 accessories.

One day the manager stuck a clipboard behind the counter with stack of paper on it. After every customer interaction, we were supposed to log What phone they had, what service they had, when they're due for an upgrade, and like 2-3 other things that I can't remember. Failure to do this would result in a write up, and eventual termination.

With a Target or Publix gig, you can more or less mind your own business and stock shelves -- helping customers is actually an awesome break from the monotony in that case. At Radio Shack, every customer interaction was painful because it was turned into an awkward interrogation.

It's a little bit tragic, but we all know RadioShack's time has passed. We appear to be living in a time of rapid transformation. RadioShack will soon no longer exist. Like payphones, printed newspapers and magazines and soon books and bookstores will follow the video rentals and record stores into history. Change can be difficult for those who live through it, but in return, we get stories to tell our grandkids.

It's not that bad a deal.

I can't really say much about how store ops ran, but I'm sure it was a result of the financial pressures the company was under just trying to survive.

They could have tried/could try to become the home tech store. Take your home to the newest level, LED lighting all around, wireless integration of home automation and security. Sharing video all around the home. Then show it off in store. Hell, sell solar panels or such, I don't care. Just give today's geek a reason to come in. I don't need a phone or a computer; but a specialized home automation turn key system... well...

https://twitter.com/MatthewTavares/status/538138578208169984