A Eulogy for RadioShack

"combined with a mismatch in demographics"

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.

> While it's glib to say that Radio Shack was lost for the want of a space

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.

I actually think RadioShack can turn things around. "Hacking" electronics is gaining ground esp with Arduino, Rpi, etc. Here's what I would do: - Beef up stock of "maker" electronics, Arduino's, Rpi, modules, kits etc. - Buy/build modules/kits, work with suppliers like SparkFun, Shmart, Adafruit for help in this area - Create "recipes" for building electronics and guide customers through purchasing the materials - Clear out all the rip-off electronics unless you are willing to match Amazon prices. - Get rid of smartphones, who buys these from Radio Shack??? - Most importantly, hold regular (weekly) free "maker sessions" for kids to learn principles of electronics and get them excited about it...similar to what Home Depot does

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 suspect he was. I used to take Radio Shack R/C cars and re-purpose them into robots. The best ones used treads as that would allow for differential steering which was much easier on the inverse kinematics than the front wheel steering. And Radio Shack always had a 'closeout/clearance' junk table that said R/C cars would end up on.

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.

Christ, I can't imagine what their corporate IT must be like.

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