Even CEO Can't Figure Out How RadioShack Still In Business
http://www.theonion.com/articles/even-ceo-cant-figure-out-ho...
RadioShack Prepares Bankruptcy Filing
101–110 of 230 posts
Re: RadioShack Prepares Bankruptcy Filing
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
May I ask why is it that Walmart (for you) belongs in the same bin as Radioshack, in terms of the variety of offerings and availability? Do you prefer Target or some other store for a greater selection or does your household mostly shop at Amazon? I've heard Walmart was making a shift to smaller, approachable and more centrally located stores and was curious to see if this was the reason why.
Walmart makes me feel depressed. Piles of awful, consumeristic shit everywhere. This, plus the fact that it is owned and run by truly terrible (in my opinion) people mean I go there only as an absolute last resort. I try to buy most things at non-chain or smaller chain stores (especially those that are known to treat their employees better) when I can.
I prefer not to shop at a place where the employees don't look like they can make ends meet. I'm not sure that is helping or hurting people on the whole, but it makes me feel better.
I wish places which underpaid their staff allowed you to pay a surcharge that would be distributed to the staff (plenty of supermarkets, petsmart, etc. will try to hit you up for small charitable donations -- I'd much rather add a few dollars to my bill to pay the employees better).
Re: RadioShack Prepares Bankruptcy Filing
#103Good riddance. May whatever small void it leaves be filled by a diversity of mom-and-pop electronics stores. There's one such store in my area that seems to do well enough catering to the professional/hobby markets, with a couple locations, and has been around for decades. (Oddly it also has free popcorn.)
Agreed, in Santa Cruz there's Santa Cruz Electronics, which has tons of microprocessors/microcontrollers, tons of bare components, higher-level electronics, etc. It's what Radio Shack used to be before it turned into a consumer electronics reseller with outrageous markups and one tiny section tucked away in the back that has maybe 4 resistors and a couple of switches.
I haven't been in SC electonics for a few years, but last time I was there I was like a kid in a candy store.
However, it always sucks to hear people will be losing their jobs. I feel for the Radio Shack employees.
Re: RadioShack Prepares Bankruptcy Filing
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Adafruit, Sparkfun, et al, might like a word with you. Even though they are smaller businesses, they are thriving, there is nothing to say that they would be if RS had taken the same road.
Adafruit, Sparkfun, et al are also working out of cheap locations, Not malls and other high rent retail locations. I ordered from Adafruit once and it shipped from an apartment in Brooklyn. Radio Shack is a retail store with many locations. There are not many people that have an immediate need for Rasberry pi components, they order online. So that model is dead. Radio Shack despite this does indeed still devote a sma…
> Adafruit, Sparkfun, et al are also working out of cheap locations
Adafruit is in Manhattan.
Re: RadioShack Prepares Bankruptcy Filing
#105[deleted]
Re: RadioShack Prepares Bankruptcy Filing
#106I'm amazed they lasted this long. There's a Radio Shack two doors down from my office. I go in about 5x/year to buy batteries, USB cables or such stuff. Each time there's a new manager. Or a new clerk. Some are polite; some don't bother -- but nobody has a clue. The stores seem totally dependent on weird promotions (buy 16 batteries; get 8 free) or copycat cell-phone deals in an era where there's always a specialized…
A new RadioShack store JUST opened around the corner from me a few weeks ago. I assume it was a short term holiday season thing.
Typical big-company clumsiness. The store-opening expert didn't get the memo about a possible bankruptcy filing. Or if it did arrive, our go-getter decided that the best way to avoid getting fired was to be right in the middle of a project that couldn't be canceled.
Re: RadioShack Prepares Bankruptcy Filing
#107A lot of people think RadioShack should have made the transition to internet sales, but I think that they actually started failing earlier, when they expanded into a non-technical market. In the 80s and 90s I could go into a Radio Shack and buy resistors, fuses, soldering equipment, breadboards, various controllers and sensors, hard drives, processors: everything I needed to assemble an electronics project, fix a com…
I think their expansion was actually quite brilliant. The store ended up selling just the high-margin items (cords, accessories, etc) that stores like Best Buy and Circuit City would upsell to offset the cost of low-margin, big-ticket items.
Re: RadioShack Prepares Bankruptcy Filing
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
A new RadioShack store JUST opened around the corner from me a few weeks ago. I assume it was a short term holiday season thing.
Typical big-company clumsiness. The store-opening expert didn't get the memo about a possible bankruptcy filing. Or if it did arrive, our go-getter decided that the best way to avoid getting fired was to be right in the middle of a project that couldn't be canceled.
I'm assuming that upper management wants things to be "business as usual" until the filing, otherwise the news would leak.
Re: RadioShack Prepares Bankruptcy Filing
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or, you know, we just don't want to have to deal with bad ads cluttering up our content, or ads that spy on and track us, or ads that start playing sound for no apparent reason, or ads that break our browsers. Yeah, no, on second thought--it's probably that we're actually pirates. That's a much more obvious answer.
This isn't a rebuttal against the tragedy of the commons argument. Commercial fisherman "just don't want to have to deal with" catching less fish, but overfishing is still a problem.
If I put a bowl of M&Ms out on my front lawn, and then complain that nobody else refills it from time to time, is that the tragedy of the commons, or me just being a fool?
Re: RadioShack Prepares Bankruptcy Filing
#110I was building an electronics project last year and found it to be very helpful to go to my local RadioShack and just browse the components. Although they didn't have a huge selection and the employees knew nothing about any of it, any selection is greater than the selection anywhere else. For people who don't live in a big city, many don't have access to electronic components offline. You can get stuff on Amazon and SparkFun, with much more selection, but sometimes it's nicer to just browse in person, even if it's tucked away in the back corner.